Compiling on windows

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 06/06/2026 4:32 PM, frustrated wrote:
> Why does dmd/ldc2 for windows use old mingw 8.0 libs?

Nobody has needed it to be updated.

Most of WinAPI was added as of Windows 2000.

Here is where to update it: 
https://github.com/dlang/installer/blob/f733556b660fd7255b2155ae4e03069184973ba6/.github/workflows/build_windows.yml#L42

> Why is dmd/ldc2 for windows so dependent on msvc and the windows sdk?

Because its the system tool chain.

If you want to program a native program, you need the system tool chain.

We do support without both, except for ImportC but that genuinely needs 
cl, and nobody has advanced supporting clang-cl which needs a bit of 
work even if you have msvc installed.