Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, October 27, 2017 02:00:53 evilrat via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 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.

Well, if it's possible to use an SDK instead of VS, then ideally, we'd
support with the installer that rather than requiring that VS be there, but
obviously, someone will have to do the work to improve the installer.

Personally, I'm really not a Windows dev, though I've had to use Visual
Studio for work often enough, so my understanding of what other SDKs might
exist from Microsoft is quite poor. I've only ever used Windows for
development when I've had to.

- Jonathan M Davis