On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 16:34:54 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>
> One little trick in the wiki is that it says that you can uncheck boxes to reduce the size/time of the download. It might be helpful to know the minimum required to get D working and the minimum required to get Visual D working.

The Visual C++ install is all that it's needed. I'll update the wiki tomorrow after I verify the options on my desktop.

>
> It also lists an alternative to install the Microsoft build tools and an appropriate version of the Windows SDK. LDC also refers to the Visual C++ build tools, but does not reference the SDK. I think the VS build tools replace the Visual C++ tools. The VS build tools look like they have an option to install the SDK and other stuff too.

I have the 2015 tools via the VS 2017 installer (it's an option), but I can't recall ever running the build tools installer directly. If anyone can verify and update the wiki, that would be great.

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 12:36:40 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 11:32:26 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> A wizard-style installation with links to things and a good flow might help a lot here. Is that possible? -- Andrei
>
> The DMD installer is already a Wizard on Windows.
>
> First it checks if you have a current version of D and will uninstall that, then it checks if you want to install D2 along with some extras (Visual D, DMC, D1), and it goes through additional steps to install the extras if you select them.
>
> However, if you need Visual Studio installed, then that takes like a half an hour. My recollection is that it's a little tricky if you upgrade to a new version of VS. I usually just uninstall D and reinstall it rather than deal with that.
>
There are other issues with the Visual Studio install that D is not responsible for but is annoying as hell. It's Microsofts fault but the result is that D installation is made difficult. To install VS, it downloads first the installer which will then download and install the software. That installer doesn't work  with the proxy installation we have on our work PC. The only way is to find the offline install package. I know they exist but finding them on the mess that is Microsoft's website is nearly impossible.
The other difficulty, installing Visual Studio when the system partition is small is also nearly impossible.
As I said, not the fault of D but annoying in any case.
This said, building apps purely 32 bit on Windows has the advantage of allowing  compatibility with legacy systems still running on XP. There are still some of them still around.

On 10/26/17 08:51, Bo wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 12:36:40 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>> However, if you need Visual Studio installed, then that takes like a
>> half an hour.
>
> And a gig of space, just because D needs a small part of it. That is why
> people do not want to install VS. Why install a competing language
> studio, when you are installing D.

The XCode installer DMG is 5GB, before unpacking. And unlike VS17, I can't pick and choose. :)

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
import quiet.dlang.dev;

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 17:02:40 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> That's exactly the kind of developer background I'm thinking of. Getting permission to redistribute from MS would be the ideal solution. If not, I'm sure someone will find a way to make it work with the LLVM or MinGW tools eventually.

Would it be possible to create import libs that for all winapi/crt libs, and redistribute them? Will such libs be legal to redist?
We have the tools (DMD/LLD), but the dependency on winsdk and VS libs is still there, unfortunatelly.

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 20:24:53 UTC, Patrick Schluter wrote:
> [snip] That installer doesn't work  with the proxy installation we have on our work PC.

This is usually the bane of my corporate existence. I have to manually install so much stuff. Anaconda and RStudio's package managers don't work. Dub fetch doesn't work on my work machine. But for whatever reason, I've never had a problem with the Visual Studio installer.

> The other difficulty, installing Visual Studio when the system partition is small is also nearly impossible.

My old home setup was a very small SSD to install Windows and then a bigger 3.5" data drive. I had to get a bigger operating system drive (NVME is pretty cool) when I started using Visual Studio more.

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 17:10:55 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

>
> The Visual C++ install is all that it's needed. I'll update the wiki tomorrow after I verify the options on my desktop.
>

You know that wiki is pretty informative, but I don't see a reference or link to it anywhere here
https://dlang.org/download.html
When you click on more information, it takes you to more information about the compilers and then you have to click on DMD and then there's a link to Installing DMD. Might make sense (by that I mean, fewer clicks) to be able to have a single Installation instructions page for each and have a link to them near the downloads.

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 20:44:49 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> The XCode installer DMG is 5GB, before unpacking. And unlike VS17, I can't pick and choose. :)

(trying to install vs2017 build tools on Win7 sp1 .. )

vs_BuildTools.exe --layout c:\btoffline
(error: requires .NET framework 4.6 of higher!!)

(ok, download web installed for .NET 4.6...50MB or so, about 5 minutes later)
(done...and installed)

(lets try again)
start: 12:04pm

vs_BuildTools.exe --layout c:\btoffline
..Give us a minute..we'll be done soon.. (yeah right!!)

total packages to download...1897

what the f##TG$!

12:08pm
layout progres..0.19%

forget it!

I'll go use FreeBSD instead.

>pkg install ldc

done..ready.to.go..start coding!

VS is the most bloated piece of crap that's ever come out of Microsoft!
Why encourage/force D developers to use it?

You also need to update your certificates just to install the components, and a through other hoops you have to jump through as well....

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 20:44:49 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> The XCode installer DMG is 5GB, before unpacking. And unlike VS17, I can't pick and choose. :)

14 minutes later...

12:18pm
layout progres..8.16%

On Friday, October 27, 2017 01:12:53 codephantom via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> VS is the most bloated piece of crap that's ever come out of
> Microsoft!
> Why encourage/force D developers to use it?

The problem is that to reasonably interact with the rest of the Windows C/C++ ecosystem, you're pretty much stuck using Microsoft's linker. If we can get that without pulling in all of VS, all the better, but without the linker, we can't link with most existing C/C++ code, which is a big problem. Before we could use MS' linker, we had complaints for years about not being compatible with other C/C++ stuff on Windows.

If we can make it work by using another linker and have it be compatible with stuff generated by MS' compiler (e.g. if LLVM's linker could be used in that case), then for many of us, that would definitely be superior to having to deal with VS, but for the moment at least, using VS seems to be the only real option if you want to interact with any existing C/C++ libraries or build for 64-bit (since OPTLINK has never been updated for 64-bit).

Now, if you're just using your own code and/or loading dlls at runtime and/or can reasonably build all C/C++ stuff you need with dmc _and_ you don't need 64-bit on Windows, then there's no reason to pull in VS, and it's nice that you don't need to. But for serious Windows projects, there's a good chance that you're going to need MS' linker, much as that sucks, and MS seems to want you to pull in VS to get it.

MS simply has not set things up in a way that makes it reasonable to avoid VS if you want to link with C/C++ libraries - especially since VS is all most C/C++ projects on Windows target at this point.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 20:44:49 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> The XCode installer DMG is 5GB, before unpacking. And unlike VS17, I can't pick and choose. :)

45 minutes later...

12:49pm
layout progres..29%