Note from a donor

[evilrat]

On Friday, 27 October 2017 at 01:40:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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

I'm not sure about WinSDK 10, but previous versions has all the 
libs and tools necessary(linker!) and is much smaller 
download(500 MB or so)

IIRC the problem is that DMD installer won't pick up SDK install 
path, and most newcomers neither has the knowledge of sc.ini nor 
the desire to mess with it.