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I've tried clang for windows twice. Each time the problem hasn't been the compiler, which works well, it has been which library to use with it on windows. Clang 5.0 worked well up until I needed the filesystem library, which isn't there. Does anyone know if it still relies on the visual studio C++ library?

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clang-cl is just a compiler. It relies on VS to provide the C and C++ standard libraries. VS 2017 has the filesystem library and it should work with clang-cl 6.

To elaborate on that, if you want to build Chromium for Windows you currently still need to install Visual Studio. We don't use its compiler anymore but we use its linker and other tools, its header files, and its libraries. Many Chromium developers also use it for editing code, and for debugging code.

Chrome is currently built using VS 2017 15.3 (that's update 3). Eventually we will probably upgrade to VS 2017 15.7 in order to get more STL conformance, linker improvements, etc.

You need the MSVC build tools and the Windows SDK. You don't need the entire Visual Studio.

Can you get the VS 2017 build tools separately any more?

Yep: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visu...

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