I'm nervous about mingw or msys2 partly because I don't know if windows will look native or unixy (I want native dark mode title bars), partly because I already have Git for Windows installed which comes with bash and a bunch of other unix utilities so I don't want to install doubles of any of those, and partly because I'm just too tired to do the uninstall dance all over again with yet another potential setup.
see above.
would you like a guide for windows with method 3?
methods 2/4 should work out of the box
still I recommend you to give a go to latest D (dmd or ldc2) with method 3
(2 may work too)
I'm nervous about mingw or msys2 partly because I don't know if windows will look native or unixy (I want native dark mode title bars), partly because I already have Git for Windows installed which comes with bash and a bunch of other unix utilities so I don't want to install doubles of any of those, and partly because I'm just too tired to do the uninstall dance all over again with yet another potential setup.
You can use method 3 or (method 7) zig-cc
(personally I have both msys2 + and git-bash)
But I think method 3 is what you need.
BTW use UnigetUI (I configured with scoop/chocolatey/winget) to install cmake/jom
WindowsSDK, C3 (for the CRT) and clang-llvm you need to do by hand.
Then you are msys2-free
Maybe I need to do a dev-to/medium article for this.