Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, October 28, 2017 02:48:00 evilrat via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 02:30:50 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> > On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 01:42:52 UTC, evilrat wrote:
> >> Since you already on that wave, can you test Windows SDK
> >> installation and make DMD's sc.ini use the SDK?
> >
> > nope. not me. I've had enough ;-)
> >
> > I use FreeBSD.
> >
> > I just wanted so see what effort I had to undertake to compile
> > D into a 64bit binary on Windows - presuming I didn't want
> > visual studio too...
> >
> > Needless to say...I'm not impressed. And I'll leave it at that.
>
> No problem. Actually there is a recent post in blog about D and
> VS where WinSDK is mentioned, might be interested to read -
> https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/
>
>
> Some clarifications - VS projects(at least MS one's, i.e. C++ and
> C#) are just xml 'build scripts' for msbuild.exe, which itself
> don't have the knowledge about project or how to build them, it
> is plugins that provides such knowledge to it. So in this sense
> VS project properties editor is just a nice UI for editing build
> scripts. And when one hit the build button in VS it is just
> invokes msbuild with that script(project file). That's why we
> have WinSDK, MSBuild tools, and VS as separate downloads, and VS
> includes the former two.
> More or less like that. This might be helpful for some users.

At a previous job where we had both Linux and Windows builds of our
libraries (though applications themselves tended to be single platform), I
got so sick of dealing with VS and the builds not being consistent across
platforms (since Linux used Makefiles, and those obviously had to be edited
separately from the VS stuff) that I rewrote our build stuff so that it was
all generated with cmake. Then editing the build was the same on both
platforms, and building was _almost_ the same. I didn't even need to open up
VS anymore - for configuration or for building. It was glorious.

I expect that it's the sort of thing that would annoy many Windows devs
though, because the fact that the VS files were generated meant that you
couldn't make changes in VS and have it stick (which from my perspective was
great, but for a hardcore Windows person, probably not so much).

- Jonathan M Davis