Provide CTA for windows user missing pre-reqs to run Positron #14848
Description
Activity
- added a parent issue
on Jul 13, 2026 Note from 07/22/2026 meeting: Should we look into bundling the distributables with Positron?
Moved to the backlog to gather user reported errors
- removed a parent issue
on Jul 29, 2026 Maybe a better way to address this would be to statically link the binary (i.e.
+crt-static) so it doesn't have the runtime dependency at all. We'd need to do this for both Ark and Kallichore since both have a C runtime dependency.Unfortunately it's not a slam dunk for Ark; R for Windows is built with the MinGW toolchain against Windows' universal C runtime (UCRT). With a dynamic runtime, ark and R share one UCRT. So if we use
+crt-static, ark gets its own copy ... heap, errno, file descriptors and the C-level environment are no longer shared. Kind of a bummer, but maybe we could work around.I hit this on a pristine Windows-11 machine with only R and Positron (both ARM versions) installed. Worked after I installed https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.arm64.exe.
Description
A pre-req to installing positron on windows is ensuring you have the
Visual C++ Redistributablesinstalled.If you don't have these installed, you'll get errors that kallichore/kernel supervisor failed to start, etc which is unhelpful in resolving the issue:
Solution
Positron already logs the error code (1073741515). That number is 0xC0000135 = STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND. We could show users a helpful error message when this happens.
Something like:
the Visual C++ Runtime, is missing. Install the redistributable from: [link]We should also show this information on the downloads page directly instead of as a very easy to miss CTA: