Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, October 27, 2017 01:12:53 codephantom via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> VS is the most bloated piece of crap that's ever come out of
> Microsoft!
> Why encourage/force D developers to use it?

The problem is that to reasonably interact with the rest of the Windows
C/C++ ecosystem, you're pretty much stuck using Microsoft's linker. If we
can get that without pulling in all of VS, all the better, but without the
linker, we can't link with most existing C/C++ code, which is a big problem.
Before we could use MS' linker, we had complaints for years about not being
compatible with other C/C++ stuff on Windows.

If we can make it work by using another linker and have it be compatible
with stuff generated by MS' compiler (e.g. if LLVM's linker could be used in
that case), then for many of us, that would definitely be superior to having
to deal with VS, but for the moment at least, using VS seems to be the only
real option if you want to interact with any existing C/C++ libraries or
build for 64-bit (since OPTLINK has never been updated for 64-bit).

Now, if you're just using your own code and/or loading dlls at runtime
and/or can reasonably build all C/C++ stuff you need with dmc _and_ you
don't need 64-bit on Windows, then there's no reason to pull in VS, and it's
nice that you don't need to. But for serious Windows projects, there's a
good chance that you're going to need MS' linker, much as that sucks, and MS
seems to want you to pull in VS to get it.

MS simply has not set things up in a way that makes it reasonable to avoid
VS if you want to link with C/C++ libraries - especially since VS is all
most C/C++ projects on Windows target at this point.

- Jonathan M Davis