Bug 17967 – dmd should work out of the box with Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt

On a system with Visual Studio / C++ Build Tools installed, it should be possible to extract the dmd windows archive, start the (vs) Developer Command Prompt and directly call: dmd test.d -m64 or dmd test.d -m32mscoff without the need to adapt anything within the sc.ini configuration file of dmd. By calling the developer command prompt (e.g. vsdevcmd -arch=amd64) all environment variables are set for the microsoft linker. The environment variable PATH has as first argument the folder containing the linker for the chosen architecture. The environment variable LIB contains all folders needed. This scenario is highly requested in a build infrastructure (XMake) where scripts downloading the dmd archvive, extracting the archive and calling dmd. Using the dmd windows setup routine which detects the visual studio is not possible. Also adapting the sc.ini by the build script is really cumbersome. The Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt should be a first citizen for dmd on windows systems.

With recent version 2.078.0 this feature was implemented.