I don't want an installer, nor to include the redistributable which is around 2 orders of magnitude larger than the application itself! I want a single tiny binary, just download and run on any system, and that's what using MSVCRT allows.
- It makes for a bigger download, of code and data that would never be used again, with one extra step the user has to do before use, and also an extra step for me to build the installer too.
I can see the advantages of an installer for large applications that need to be "installed" since they modify various other things in the system, but that's not the type of applications I work with.
According to MS who seem to be trying to force the idea that all software needs to be "installed" and have an overly complex installer/uninstaller. I care more about the flexibility and convenience for my users than what MS thinks (which is ultimately heading towards locking users in a walled garden, so no surprise that "just download and run a self-contained executable anywhere" is perceived as somewhat of a threat.)
> And you get the benefit of being able to easy throw it out via GPO, pull dependencies like VCRT versions etc.
Those are not needed for what I'm doing, so they're not benefits to me. But I guess if your idea of "pretty small" is 400k, then that's not really a concern...