On Sunday, 19 June 2016 at 14:45:43 UTC, Rene Zwanenburg wrote:
On Sunday, 19 June 2016 at 14:05:22 UTC, mogu wrote:
Today, I'm working on a private GUI tool which must be run at
linux and windows. It's awful that I compile a little 64bit
program(or -m32mscoff) in windows must have visual studio
which has tremendous size installed even though I only need a
linker. It's weird that a compiler compiles to binary targets
needs another compiler or tools. Sigh.
There's no need to install VS if you don't use it otherwise,
the windows platform SDK should suffice; it comes with the
microsoft linker and all the lib files, and the DMD installer
should detect it just fine.
Then there should be a better pointer to the installation process.
I had similar issues as the OP to build on Windows. Installing
the Visual Studio cruft is not as easy as it looks like. While it
is probably a good ide and compiler it is a chore to install on
somewhat atypical windows PC. At home, my windows is installed on
a SSD and only a 52 GB partition (around 10 GB free), which means
that big apps have to be installed on other partition. The Visual
Studio cruft does not allow to do that correctly, it installs
quite a lot of stuff on the system drive (and I suppose that the
system crash I got 1 week after installation was linked to that
installation). On my work PC the issue was a bit different, the
sys partition is bigger, but we are behind an annoying proxy and
the corporate policies are restricted, making the installation of
it a real adventure (finding the downloadable .iso on microsoft's
page requires a degree for itself).
While I understand that relying on Microsft tools simplifies the
dmd compiler, it is really a big installation hurdle (on Linux
the issue is quite different and has more to do with the
braindead policies of our IT service. We must compile everything
from sources and building dmd is difficult, building a D compiler
that requires a D compiler to be built has some spice (this said
gcc 5.1 was also not easy to build with gcc 4.4.7 preinstalled,
gcc 4.4.7 fails on gcc 5.1, you have to build 4.7, with 4.7 4.8
and 4.8 is the last version that can compile the C++ used in
newer versions).
