Note from a donor

[Mike Parker]

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 10:16:27 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On 10/26/17 00:32, Jacob Carlborg wrote:

>>
>> IIRC, there have been people on these forums that have been 
>> asking why
>> they need to download additional software when they already 
>> have the
>> compiler.
>>
>> Same on macOS.
>>
>
> How many though? Also, we have to do it for macOS, why is 
> Windows special? The macOS setup was just as hard. Download two 
> large packages (XCode+Cmd tools), install, and done.

There definitely has been an uptick in that sort of complaint. 
The question should be, how many aren't coming here to complain?

My initial internal reaction has always been, "just download and 
install -- how hard is it?". But one day I stopped and asked 
myself, what if I were coming to D today? I got by just fine for 
years without having VS installed. Once the 6.0 days were behind 
me, I neither needed nor wanted VS. I was content with mingw for 
my C stuff. When I first came to D, I came with the full 
knowledge that there was no ecosystem, things were rough, and I'd 
have to do a lot by hand. I stuck around because the language was 
worth it. If I came in today and saw that I needed to install VS 
just to get 64-bit binaries, I doubt I'd stick around long enough 
to discover how great the language is.

I also didn't like that I had to install the Xcode tools on my 
Mac, but that's needed for any development on Mac from what I can 
see.