Installing D 2.072.0 on Windows 7 64-bit. After installation is complete I get the following two error (warning?) messages, screenshots here:

http://imgur.com/a/5fydB

For your convenience they read as follows:

"Could not detect Visual Studio (2008-2015 are supported). No 64-bit support."

"Could not detect Windows SDK (6.0A-10.0 are supported). No 64-bit support."

So the above means that the DMD compiler will not be able to generate 64-bit executables on my system, because a third-party piece of software is missing? This is ridiculous, what does Visual Studio have to do with DMD and its capability to generate 64-bit code?

"You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle."

On 14/11/2016 9:38 PM, AB wrote:
> Installing D 2.072.0 on Windows 7 64-bit. After installation is complete
> I get the following two error (warning?) messages, screenshots here:
>
> http://imgur.com/a/5fydB
>
> For your convenience they read as follows:
>
> "Could not detect Visual Studio (2008-2015 are supported). No 64-bit
> support."
>
> "Could not detect Windows SDK (6.0A-10.0 are supported). No 64-bit
> support."
>
> So the above means that the DMD compiler will not be able to generate
> 64-bit executables on my system, because a third-party piece of software
> is missing? This is ridiculous, what does Visual Studio have to do with
> DMD and its capability to generate 64-bit code?
>
> "You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana
> and the entire jungle."

Visual Studio automatically installs the MSVC tool chain which includes the linker, Microsoft's libc and of course import libraries for linking against.
Which we use for 64bit and 32bit coff support.

This is the systems official tool chain, it isn't all that rediculas. After all, it is what is "standard" for building c/c++ libraries on Windows, which is nice for you know compatibility reasons.

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 08:38:32 UTC, AB wrote:
> This is ridiculous, what does Visual Studio have to do with DMD and its capability to generate 64-bit code?

DMD can generate 64-bit object files just fine, you only need to link them, and DMD can invoke ms linker for you, that's all.

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:06:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> DMD can generate 64-bit object files just fine, you only need to link them, and DMD can invoke ms linker for you, that's all.

It is unreasonable to pull in the many GBs of Visual Studio as a dependency only to use its 64-bit linker.

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:33:48 UTC, AB wrote:
> On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:06:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> DMD can generate 64-bit object files just fine, you only need to link them, and DMD can invoke ms linker for you, that's all.
>
> It is unreasonable to pull in the many GBs of Visual Studio as a dependency only to use its 64-bit linker.

It used to be a pain to install the microsoft toolchain without install VS.

Now there is http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools, perhaps we should be encouraging using that instead?

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:51:39 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> Now there is http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools, perhaps we should be encouraging using that instead?

It's still 3gb, so one might want to delete unneeded stuff after installation, like arm tools and cross compilers.

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:33:48 UTC, AB wrote:
> On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:06:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> DMD can generate 64-bit object files just fine, you only need to link them, and DMD can invoke ms linker for you, that's all.
>
> It is unreasonable to pull in the many GBs of Visual Studio as a dependency only to use its 64-bit linker.

No, it isn't unreasonable. The alternative is for Walter to write a new linker that is compatible with the Microsoft ecosystem. He instead took the expedient, and IMO correct, course of working with the system linker. If you do C or C++ development with Clang on Windows these days, it's best to have the MS tools installed. This isn't any different.

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:33:48 UTC, AB wrote:
> On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:06:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> DMD can generate 64-bit object files just fine, you only need to link them, and DMD can invoke ms linker for you, that's all.
>
> It is unreasonable to pull in the many GBs of Visual Studio as a dependency only to use its 64-bit linker.

That's a true issue imho also. I had the same problem. Both my machine at work and at home have their windows system partition on a smallish SSD. Installing Visual Studio failed because of lack of space. Even installing it on another drive fails because even in that case the Microsofties want to install gigabytes of stuff on the system drive. Extremely annoying when you only want to install an otherwise extremely lean development tool (dmd) to test 100 liners.

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 10:20:48 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 09:51:39 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>> Now there is http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools, perhaps we should be encouraging using that instead?
>
> It's still 3gb, so one might want to delete unneeded stuff after installation, like arm tools and cross compilers.

Doesn't the installer allow you to pick which bits to download?

On Monday, 14 November 2016 at 08:38:32 UTC, AB wrote:
> Installing D 2.072.0 on Windows 7 64-bit. After installation is complete I get the following two error (warning?) messages, screenshots here:
>
> http://imgur.com/a/5fydB
>
> For your convenience they read as follows:
>
> "Could not detect Visual Studio (2008-2015 are supported). No 64-bit support."
>
> "Could not detect Windows SDK (6.0A-10.0 are supported). No 64-bit support."
>
> So the above means that the DMD compiler will not be able to generate 64-bit executables on my system, because a third-party piece of software is missing? This is ridiculous, what does Visual Studio have to do with DMD and its capability to generate 64-bit code?
>
> "You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle."

It used to be possible to get just the command-line tools by installing the much smaller Windows SDK:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/hvdyyutbgehlefluvsup@forum.dlang.org

If that's not the case anymore, I suggest you take it up with Microsoft.