On Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:41:10 -0800 Walter Bright <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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. >
Interesting thing about this, is that if/when we did have this "new linker" as discussed (including separation of individual object file formats) is that we could also add in our own object file format designed (and proven via a good test suite) to be much less quirky and badly documented. Or, you know, not quirky and not badly documented ;) Thus, at the very least, opening a door for others to migrate, and potentially/finally/eventually get rid of the crufty current formats. I mean, like you said, linkers are very simple conceptually. So if they *can* be so simple, why should everyone have to continue to stay stuck with a crappy one? Just my random thoughts on it anyway.
