Import C under Windows 10

[DLearner]

On Wednesday, 15 April 2026 at 19:28:33 UTC, drug007 wrote:
> On 4/15/26 21:54, DLearner wrote:
[...]
>> 
>> However, would it not be better if the Windows DMD download 
>> was 'battery included', in the sense that the built-in C 
>> compiler did it's own preprocessing?
>
> I don't think it's worth it. Too much efforts for nothing. dmd 
> does not contain an internal C compiler, not at all, dmd 
> translates C to D AST. And dmd does not contain a preprocessor 
> in any form. So you need to write C preprocessor from scratch.

If the maintainers of DMD don't wish to write a new preprocessor, 
could not one of the four or five preprocessors mentioned in 
42.4.2 be somehow incorporated?

It's just that cl.exe is less than 1Mb, yet the Visual Studio 
download to be able to use it is over 10Gb!
And one seems to be forced to use the 'Developer Powershell', 
which is very sluggish compared to the normal terminal window (if 
you run DMD in the normal terminal window it can't find cl.exe).