About ten days ago, I installed the latest Visual D from GitHub and ran into some problems when trying out the DMD/GDC console application to use the “DMD | x64” config to compile a simple console app as an x64 native Windows application.

While I have not yet tested it, I believe the installer would have worked out of the box on my Windows 7 machine. But on my Windows 8.1 laptop, I had some trouble. Rather than boring you with all the things I tried, I will just share what finally worked for me.

Here’s the console app code I was working with:

import std.stdio;

int main(string[] argv)
{
    writeln("Hello D-World!");
	readln();
    return 0;
}

I had downloaded and installed Visual D with VisualD-v0.3.37.exe. I had also downloaded and installed the latest DMD compiler from dlang.org. In the process of figuring things out, I also reinstalled Visual D.

In Visual Studio, I created a new DMD/GDC console app from the D Language tab in the new project dialog. This console app template comes preconfigured with a configuration called "Debug DMD|x64" and I switched to that. But when I hit F6 to build, I would get the following error:

------ Build started: Project: ConsoleApp1, Configuration: Debug DMD x64 ------
Building Debug DMD x64\ConsoleApp1.exe...
LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'user32.lib'
Building Debug DMD x64\ConsoleApp1.exe failed!
------

After doing some browsing and searching, I found the known issues page and the fix described on the page did not work but it did lead me to do some more digging and experimenting until I found that modifying the sc.ini file with some very specific changes solved the problem. Here are the relevant lines, as modified, in my sc.ini file that finally made it possible for my little program to compile. (update—only the Environment64 changes are required—while Rainer Scheutze suggests that the paths can be modifed in Visual Studio, I’ve not been able to make that work).

[Environment64]
   ; original LIB="%@P%\..\lib64"
   LIB="%@P%\..\lib64";\dm\lib;"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Lib\win8\um\x64";%DMD_LIB%

This post will be my saved notes for the next time I have to configure a Windows 8.1 machine for D programming language in Visual Studio 2013 (and beyond). And I hope you find it useful too.