On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 18:03:31 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Perhaps we should take the missing parts from the ELLCC tool chain [1]. It's a cross-compiler tool chain based on LLVM. It contains a compiler, linker, C/C++ standard library, other binutils and is completely self contained.
>
> [1] http://ellcc.org

It seems to use MinGW-w64, which uses the GNU linker, which can't create PDB files.

On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 17:34:58 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> 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.

+1000. I hope this ridiculous thread comes to an end (nope, ELLCC is not a solution).

So yes, the DMD installer is right in warning that 64-bit code cannot be linked if VS isn't detected. It should detect the VC++ Build Tools though => https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16688. 32-bit MS COFF cannot be linked either, but let's not confuse new users by a too detailed msgbox.

On 2016-11-17 11:16, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:

> It seems to use MinGW-w64, which uses the GNU linker, which can't create
> PDB files.

I thought the whole tool chain was based on LLVM, but I might be wrong.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg