On Wednesday, 12 August 2015 at 14:57:17 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> Well I'm not sure what percent "serious system programming" is done by other people, but I don't do any.

I understand your points. I meant to say that D is a system programming language (too), so it's tightly coupled to some internals of the OS. And Windows being a proprietary OS, Visual Studio or more precisely at least its runtime is likely to be required in the future as well.

Almost ;) proper support for Win64 in LDC is about to be completed with the next release. It will most likely require Visual Studio 2015. But that's about it, you'll just need to extract an LDC archive. When invoking ldc2.exe, you'll need to make sure some environment variables are properly set up (e.g., by using a Visual Studio command prompt), for it to find the linker, libs etc.

Last time I built clang (from source, using Visual Studio) I was amazed by how painless that was. LLVM requires VS 2013 atm (at least for building), but Windows/MSVC support is still being finalized (native MSVCRT exception handling etc.). VS 2008 is really quite old by now, so I'd really recommend upgrading (VS 2015 Community is free btw).

On Wednesday, 12 August 2015 at 14:57:17 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> Regardless, my point is more about the importance of a seamless installation on Windows than necessarily about what is required or not.


> This isn't unique to D. I just tried to install the Clang Windows binary and I got a message about MSVC integration failing. I have Visual Express 2008,

The express versions of Visual Studio do not include everything needed to do Windows development. You also need download a version of the Windows SDK. My recommendation is that you just uninstall the Express version and install Visual Studio Community 2013. Then go ahead and remove every trace of DMD from your system. Make sure it's not in your system PATH. After that, download the latest installer and run it. It will find your VS installation automatically and will configure sc.ini appropriately. It has worked for me every time I've tried it.

I don't think DMD is able to work with 2015 just yet, because of the C Runtime changes. I had trouble with it when VS 2015 was first released, so I deleted it and reverted to 2013.

On Wednesday, 12 August 2015 at 13:32:10 UTC, kink wrote:
> Afaik DMD for Win64 requires the MS linker, so good luck without Visual Studio then. Same goes for LDC on Win64, although an LLVM COFF linker is under development. Serious system programming on Windows without MSVC and its C runtime? Not really an option; MinGW appears to be a dead end and never really fitted the Windows eco-system.

MSVC toolchain is required to link 3rd-party C++ code compiled with MSVC, mingw links c runtime just fine.