No Windows SDK installed when installing Rust on a freshly installed Windows 11

[vagreargnatry]

Verification

• I searched for recent similar issues at https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen%2Cclosed and found no duplicates.
• I am on the latest version of Rustup according to https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/tags and am still able to reproduce my issue.

Problem

I just reinstalled Windows 11 Home Edition 24H2. When I installed Rustup, I didn't see the Windows SDK installed. I remember it being installed with Windows SDK 22000. After installing Rust, I tried creating a new project with cargo and then running cargo run. The terminal complained that I was missing link.exe. I then went to Visual Studio 17.14.12 and saw that the only Windows SDKs available were 19041, 22621, and 26100. I chose to install 26100. After the installation, I ran cargo run again, and it worked correctly.

Steps

1. Prepare a Windows 11 system that has not installed Rust and Visudo Studio related content.
2. Double-click rustup-init.exe.
3. Choose to install Visual Studio Community Edition.

Possible Solution(s)

If I remember correctly, it used to install Windows SDK version 22000. Now it seems it is gone, maybe it's time to choose to install another version of Windows SDK by default.

Notes

No response

Rustup version

rustup 1.28.2 (e4f3ad6f8 2025-04-28)
info: This is the version for the rustup toolchain manager, not the rustc compiler.
info: The currently active `rustc` version is `rustc 1.89.0 (29483883e 2025-08-04)`

Installed toolchains

Default host: x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
rustup home:  C:\Users\shapg\.rustup

installed toolchains
--------------------
stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (active, default)

active toolchain
----------------
name: stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
active because: it's the default toolchain
installed targets:
  x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

OS version

Windows 11 Home Edition 24H2 26100.4946

[rami3l]

@vagreargnatry Thanks for your report!

FYI we do hardcode 22000 in the installation helper because it is known to work at least at the time of writing:

rustup/src/cli/self_update/windows.rs

Lines 309 to 314 in 3f6b75b

	if !has_windows_sdk_libs(process) {
	cmd.args([
	"--add",
	"Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows11SDK.22000",
	]);
	}

... are you suggesting that this toolchain is no longer being distributed?

cc @ChrisDenton is there a more generic way than just pinning a version here?

[vagreargnatry]

@rami3l Thanks for the response. Yes, I searched this and it said that 22000 has been removed.
microsoft/win32metadata#2110

[ChrisDenton]

Yes, this is unfortunate. Last I looked into it there was no general way to install the latest available Windows SDK via the installer. So our only viable option is to hard code it somewhere.

Though maybe in the future we could make this more adaptable. If we put the components needed to be installed in a text file that can be downloaded by rustup, then maybe we could make changes without needing to release a new version of rustup.