On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 17:06:37 UTC, Patrick Schluter
wrote:
I get the technical reasons for using the MS toolchain but that
doesn't change the fact that it is an ugly wart that has
several negative aspect. Because in addition to the cases
already described where it can be a pita to install there's
also an image problem with that approach. dmd's adoption had
always suffered from the closed source licence of the backend
with one small company, adding a second depency, furthermore on
a company not specially known for its openess (yeah, I know
that it's a little bit better now) will raise criticism.
This issue is not big but it is definitely a - point when one
makes a checklist of + and - points for a language (just a
semi-related question, what's the state of play in the
concurrent languages go, rust, scala etc...?)
Why is it a wart? The MS toolchain is the system development
environment for Windows. On Mac OS X, it's Xcode, which is a 1+
GB download before you can do any development with clang or dmd
or anything that depends on it. On Linux distros, if it the GCC
packages aren't already installed, they need to be pulled down.
I mean, I get that the MS tools might not be perceived by some as
the 'system' tools, but that is what they are. It's no different
than the other systems DMD is distributed on.
