Windows Setup Process Questions Regarding Build Tools

[r6915ee]

I myself nowadays do not have Visual Studio itself installed on my computer. This is the case for me, because Visual Studio takes up around 30 gigabytes in a fairly small installation, enough to use Lime and a few other development tools such as the .NET SDK.

In place of it, I now have the Build Tools installed separately. At most, it takes around only 6 gigabytes, which is fine by me. I have the workloads and components installed that Lime mainly uses, and have tested building a medium-sized project with it, in particular this one - to which the result was the build functioning how it's supposed to in terms of the frontend solution that Lime uses and the actual program running well.

However, issues arise when using haxelib run lime setup windows to actually set up Lime for usage with Windows, such as including Lime in the PATH. The output of this command holds:

In order to build native executables for Windows, you must have a
Visual Studio C++ compiler with "Windows Desktop" (Win32) support
installed. We recommend using Visual Studio Community, which is
available as a free download from Microsoft.

No additional configuration is required.

Would you like to visit the download page now? [y/n/a] ?

Inserting y or a brings me to the Visual Studio downloads page, and n does, of course, nothing. Lime then immediately exits.

With this, I'm confused on why Lime does not allow the setup of the Windows platform with only the Build Tools, since that's what Lime requires and not an entire Visual Studio installation. Why is this the case? For information, I have installed the Build Tools in a separate partition, if that is necessary.

[r6915ee]

Ah, my apologies for the discussion being opened. It seems that Lime always does this, according to PlatformSetup.hx.

[joshtynjala]

Yeah, you are not required to run haxelib run lime setup windows if you already have Visual Studio or the appropriate build tooling installed already. That command mainly exists to provide instructions that explain what you need to do if you're starting from scratch. The process does not include any kind of detection of a Visual Studio installation. It always displays the same instructions regardless of what's currently installed on your system.

[r6915ee]

I did at least assume that a full Visual Studio installation was necessary; it's nice that this isn't the case, considering how large Visual Studio is. I did also try using the singular setup command originally, and that only updated the packages but did not include Lime in the PATH; it turns out that that issue was simply because I removed Haxe from my machine and then reinstalled it as a portable binary, which resulted in HAXEPATH not being available - adding it back to point to the new directory worked.

I do believe that the aforementioned project has a script that installs particular binaries and libraries automatically and does use vswhere.exe from the Visual Studio Installer to check whether or not a Visual Studio component installation is present, so I assumed that it would also be the case here, but to my surprise it wasn't. I'm at least glad that this issue wasn't very large, however.