Note from a donor

[Jeremy DeHaan]

On Friday, 27 October 2017 at 02:20:54 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> Well, if it's possible to use an SDK instead of VS, then 
> ideally, we'd support with the installer that rather than 
> requiring that VS be there, but obviously, someone will have to 
> do the work to improve the installer.
>
> Personally, I'm really not a Windows dev, though I've had to 
> use Visual Studio for work often enough, so my understanding of 
> what other SDKs might exist from Microsoft is quite poor. I've 
> only ever used Windows for development when I've had to.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

A while back I played with the idea of a VS replacement for D and 
I made some progress using this:
http://www.smorgasbordet.com/pellesc/

I managed to swap out the VS linker and use the included linker 
to build a 64-bit D binary, but that was as far as I got at the 
time.

It's not open source, but the terms of use are pretty permissive. 
Maybe it's worth taking another look.