D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[kink via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 15 November 2016 at 13:23:38 UTC, AB wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 November 2016 at 11:28:16 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 15 November 2016 at 10:31:23 UTC, AB wrote:
>>> Are there plans to write a homebrew 64-bit linker for DMD?
>>
>> There are already ld from mingw and lld from llvm team.
>
> Why aren't they used and distributed in DMD for Windows by 
> default?
>
> If the tools mentioned above (LD and LLD) are available and 
> usable on Windows x64 instead of the ones provided in heavily 
> bloated packages by Microsoft, how come the DMD installer for 
> Windows doesn't offer them as an alternative (or better yet as 
> the default)?

It's not just the linker. You need the libs as well (static and 
dynamic ones), and not just the WinSDK ones, but the MSVCRT ones 
too. Just use the Visual C++ Build Tools if there's not enough 
disk space in 2016 *cough*. IMO there's just no way of doing 
professional Windows development without the MS toolchain. And no 
reason to complain about it just because most Linux distros come 
with a fully fledged development ecosystem.