Note from a donor

[Paulo Pinto]

On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 03:00:16 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Saturday, October 28, 2017 02:48:00 evilrat via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 02:30:50 UTC, codephantom 
>> wrote:
>> > On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 01:42:52 UTC, evilrat wrote:
>> >> Since you already on that wave, can you test Windows SDK 
>> >> installation and make DMD's sc.ini use the SDK?
>> >
>> > nope. not me. I've had enough ;-)
>> >
>> > I use FreeBSD.
>> >
>> > I just wanted so see what effort I had to undertake to 
>> > compile D into a 64bit binary on Windows - presuming I 
>> > didn't want visual studio too...
>> >
>> > Needless to say...I'm not impressed. And I'll leave it at 
>> > that.
>>
>> No problem. Actually there is a recent post in blog about D 
>> and VS where WinSDK is mentioned, might be interested to read 
>> - https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/
>>
>>
>> Some clarifications - VS projects(at least MS one's, i.e. C++ 
>> and
>> C#) are just xml 'build scripts' for msbuild.exe, which itself
>> don't have the knowledge about project or how to build them, it
>> is plugins that provides such knowledge to it. So in this sense
>> VS project properties editor is just a nice UI for editing 
>> build
>> scripts. And when one hit the build button in VS it is just
>> invokes msbuild with that script(project file). That's why we
>> have WinSDK, MSBuild tools, and VS as separate downloads, and 
>> VS
>> includes the former two.
>> More or less like that. This might be helpful for some users.
>
> At a previous job where we had both Linux and Windows builds of 
> our libraries (though applications themselves tended to be 
> single platform), I got so sick of dealing with VS and the 
> builds not being consistent across platforms (since Linux used 
> Makefiles, and those obviously had to be edited separately from 
> the VS stuff) that I rewrote our build stuff so that it was all 
> generated with cmake. Then editing the build was the same on 
> both platforms, and building was _almost_ the same. I didn't 
> even need to open up VS anymore - for configuration or for 
> building. It was glorious.
>
> I expect that it's the sort of thing that would annoy many 
> Windows devs though, because the fact that the VS files were 
> generated meant that you couldn't make changes in VS and have 
> it stick (which from my perspective was great, but for a 
> hardcore Windows person, probably not so much).
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Visual Studio 2017 has native support for cmake as project format.

It is also the new official format for Android NDK development.

So we are quite ok with using cmake. :)