On 3/7/2013 7:27 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
"Walter Bright" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
On 3/7/2013 7:09 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
Good, but does the code still increase the difficulty in porting?
I don't understand your question.
Does the presence of support for eg. linking OS2 executables make the
codebase harder to understand?
Yes.
That's correct. However, it'll be much more maintainable,
I don't know how much redesign you're planning, but I can't imagine it ever
being as maintainable as a pure d codebase. A less stable/complete linker
that attracts more contributors should overtake a more stable linker with
only a couple of developers that grok it.
That's true, but we don't have that other linker yet.
The other thing is, we just don't have a need for our own linker for any
platform other than win32. So what's the cost benefit moving forward? I think
it's easier to just fix optlink's bugs.
I don't want to discourage people from trying to come up with a replacement
linker for win32 written in D. I think that is a great project. But while a
linker is a conceptually simple program, the awful file formats involved make it
unnecessarily difficult and there are simply a lot of details and other things
one has to do.
Like I said before, it'll take a sustained and determined effort to come up with
a viable replacement for optlink.
What is the license on optlink?
Same as the dmd back end.
Can other linkers actually use this information?
They can use the information, yes, but not the code.
