Visual Studio 2013 no longer available for download

[cheapsteak]

This link now only contains download for vs 2017:
https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs#d-express-windows-desktop

Should the readme be updated?
What would be the method for building node-sass on windows now?

[nschonni]

I think it should probibly point to the node-gyp instructions since that is really what we require https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp#installation. That said I want to say there was an issue at one point with the optimizations in 2015 that didn't play nice with XP?

[saper]

@nschonni the reason we insisted on vs2013 was that the official node builds were build with vs2013 at the time. Mixing C++ runtime libs across the module border is never guarantee to work. Our XP users got hit with some particular difference in the way a thread local storage got initialized.

[cheapsteak]

What do you think about replacing it with this?
npm install --global --production windows-build-tools node-gyp

Referenced from node-gyp's instructions for windows, which references Microsofts' NodeJS Guidelines

[nschonni]

Maybe a cleaned up version of this? https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers#from-source
It's probably good to look around at some of the native packages and see how they explain it.

[xzyfer]

I'm all for recommending windows-build-tools over VS2013 if we can verify the compiled binary works as expected.

[saper]

Good idea, we only need to check it can be cached (so we do not download it every time) and that my fancy PDB debugging support works :)