On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:59:21 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe
wrote:
Windows 32 bit is the special one - it is the ONLY platform
where D works out of the box without additional downloads.
That's one reason why I advocate it for just playing around -
it just works.
On ALL other platforms for dmd: Win64, Linux 32/64, Mac,
freebsd, you require additional downloads from the OS vendor to
build your program.
The only difference is size of the download from the OS vendor,
and odds that it was already installed by something else. But
it is the same idea - you use the OS vendor's linker and system
libs to facilitate interoperability with other language code.
DMD with the default -m32 is great for just playing around. No
Windows D user would deny it. I compile with that far more than
with -m64 (or any LDC for that matter). It's only really when you
need -m64 (or -m32mscoff for that matter), and I mean really need
it, that one needs to bother with Visual Studio. Perhaps that's
part of the frustration. Things are so easy with the default and
so frustrating when you have to make the change. For me, that
point comes when trying to call C libraries in D. Downloading
Visual Studio and installing it is a one-time cost, but getting C
libraries working with D is something I don't do enough to
remember the tricks. If the C library is compiled with Visual
Studio, then you have to use the VS linker. But it usually will
be something MinGW or Cygwin. From there, you might have some
series of steps that I would never remember and always need to
google to get it working. That's the frustrating part. Installing
Visual Studio is annoying, but not really a huge deal for me in
the grand scheme of things.
