D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:33:48 UTC, AB wrote:
> On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:06:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> DMD can generate 64-bit object files just fine, you only need 
>> to link them, and DMD can invoke ms linker for you, that's all.
>
> It is unreasonable to pull in the many GBs of Visual Studio as 
> a dependency only to use its 64-bit linker.

It used to be a pain to install the microsoft toolchain without 
install VS.

Now there is 
http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools, 
perhaps we should be encouraging using that instead?