Hi all!
I co-maintain the Kickstart project to help new users get going with Vim.
Right now, when they install or ask Lazy to update, they see this:
You can avoid this if you have a C compiler on your PATH, but Windows experts very strenuously insist that this is a bad idea.
I work around this by using the Powershell prompt that comes with Visual Studio, but it confuses new users.
Are there any efforts to fix this or, barring that, what best practice should we suggest for new users?
Since this is a strange quirk on Windows, and the knowledge of handling PATH is just an assumed skills for UNIX world. I guess you can add some logic in kickstart to “guess” the common path to store C compiler on Windows if no C compiler is in PATH.
That’s a great idea in principle but in practice it’s almost impossible.
First, for many Windows appare there are no default install paths.
Second, there are an infinity of C compilers for Windows. Just off the top:
the list goes on 
This might work in this case, but it does not in general. Then, you’d need to add the path to the linker/librarian. Done? Not really, cause then you’d need to add the path to all libraries you need to link to. Finally, runtime libraries. So that’s not a viable solution to be done manually. So, generally, some environment setup scripts are provided.
Something that in most of the cases is not needed in UNIX-like systems, for how libraries and dependencies are installed in the system.
Not that I think this is good, and indeed it does not foster full support of things like this one on Windows systems.
One way could be to automatically detect a VS development kit, which normally should reside in a standard path set by the installation process (except if the user manually changed it). In any case, you could query the VS{2015/2017/2019/2022}INSTALLDIR ENV variable, and if found, launch a separate process where you launch the VS prompt and compile with the VS cl C compiler.
Or, if for some reasons VS is not installed in the system, another most used development kit Intel’s oneAPI, which is now made free. You could query for the ENV variable ONEAPI_ROOT. If it exists, then in a separate process launch the setup script %ONEAPI_ROOT%\setvars.bat and call the cc/clang Intel compiler.
This way, no action is required by the user, if it is not at ease with such things. Everything would be automatically managed under-the-hood.
Hope this might help somehow.
Found my own answer here and I’m delighted.
Just follow these instructions from the Treesitter site, this will allow it to download pre-compiled artifacts from Github on platforms where requiring a compiler on the path is a stupendously bad idea.
