D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[Mike Parker 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.

No, it isn't unreasonable. The alternative is for Walter to write 
a new linker that is compatible with the Microsoft ecosystem. He 
instead took the expedient, and IMO correct, course of working 
with the system linker. If you do C or C++ development with Clang 
on Windows these days, it's best to have the MS tools installed. 
This isn't any different.