Note from a donor

[Patrick Schluter]

On Sunday, 29 October 2017 at 03:46:35 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 October 2017 at 02:09:31 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
>> It seems to me that you have a major case of anti-windows bias 
>> here, as I never have any issues on my main windows machine.
>
> Actually, it's the very opposite...I'm strongly arguing 'for' D 
> on Windows.
>
> (otherwise I wouldn't have wasted my time with this).
>
> If you're ok with having VS, then that is not too much of pain 
> to install..I get it.
>
> But if you don't want VS, then it really is a pain. You have to 
> work out what is the min required components....all by yourself 
> - like i had to do. That really was a pain!
>
> I want D on Windows (64bit included), and I want it to be a 
> better experience than what I had...that's been the whole point 
> of my involvement in the discussion.
>
> In essence, I'm an advocate for D on Windows ;-)
>
> (but to do that, without being forced to advocate for VS as 
> well..is kinda challenging..it seems)
>
> It's D I'm interested in. Not VS.

Just a little answer so that you see that you're not alone with 
your concerns. I think you're absolutely right and that your 
experiment was nicely done and clear from the beginning what it 
was about. Reading is a skill that some people seem to have 
problems with.
To my experience now. I finally managed to install VS2017 by 
doing essentially the sleep during download thing to get the 
offline installer. My Internet is not especially bad but not good 
either (5 Mb down, 1 Mb up ADSL with very fluctuating latencies) 
and the download took also several hours. For 1.6 GB it's really 
slow. It has probably more to do with the Microsoft download code 
than anything else (as the discussions in the link someone 
provided tend to show).
The good thing is that it is now possible to install VS2017 on a 
relatively small system partition, a thing that I didn't manage 
to do with VS2013 and VS2015. The DMD installer also had no 
problem to install the Visual-D plug-in and I managed to build my 
project in 32 and 64 bit.
This said, it's the whole VS experience that I'm really annoyed 
with. MS goes really out of its way to make the whole IDE as 
magical as possible, i.e. everything is set so that the gritty 
reality of code generation is hidden from the developer. The more 
it goes, the less obvious it gets to install unconventional 
things in the environment. Even simple stuff can become a real 
pain. For instance, I like to have visible white spaces when 
editing code (yeah, I hate tabs in program code). In all editors 
and IDE I have tried yet, it was easy to set, when not in an 
appearance toolbar, it's somewhere in "view" or "edit" menu. In 
VS, it was a chore to find and I had to customize a tool bar 
using 5 deep dialog box galore. Annoying. I can understand how 
and why MS do it that way. When you work a little bit longer with 
it, it is really sleek and nicely integrated in the system. The 
thing is, it that it removes the perspective of what really 
happens when building a program (object files, libs, linking 
etc.) and that's the reason why we get so regularely the 
complaints about the "Windows experience sucking": MS has 
nurtured a generation of devs who have no clue what building an 
app entails.
To conclude: if D wants to cater to that crowd, it will have to 
bite the bullet and make the Windows experience even smoother 
than it is now. You won't overcome Windows dev's Stockholm 
syndrome otherwise and Windows devs, should also peg down a 
little bit and learn that MS's way of doing things is far from 
being ideal (bloat, loss of control, changing specs every 3 
years, programmed obsolescence (Active-X anyone?)).