Note from a donor

[codephantom]

On Sunday, 29 October 2017 at 10:21:22 UTC, Patrick Schluter 
wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the support ;-)

btw. I was just experimenting with the Windows 7 SDK iso (a 570MB 
download)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=8442

 From that ISO, I only need to install two components:
- Header and Libraries (only the x64 ones are needed) (~180MB)
- Visual C++ Compilers (~637MB)

The total disk space needed to install those 2 components is 
810MB.

Then I can compile D using -m64

However DMD won't pick up the SDK during install, so I had to 
change these two settings in the sc.ini:

VCINSTALLDIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 
10.0\VC\
WindowsSdkDir=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\

To my surprise (not really knowing what I was doing), it all 
worked (so far), and apart from downloading the iso, you don't 
need to be connected to the internet during the install of the 
SDK...

The SDK requires you have .NET 4 installed first though, 
otherwise it won't let you install the Visual C++ Compilers.

btw. The min size if you use the VS 2017 build tools was 3.5GB 
installed.

So I have saved myself several gb of download, and several gb of 
disk space...just by using the Windows 7 SDK instead.