On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 09:17:05 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 09:06:11 UTC, Rikki Cattermole
wrote:
On 30/07/2014 8:58 p.m., Joakim wrote:
On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 08:12:17 UTC, Rikki Cattermole
wrote:
On 30/07/2014 7:03 p.m., Kagamin wrote:
Making dmd generate coff would make more sense.
+1
Most of the code should already be present in dmd, which
makes it far
crazier not to.
What makes it craziest is that there's a COFF32 branch lying
around that
nobody merges:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]?page=9#post-llldfc:242q6p:241:40digitalmars.com
It would be a far better use of Jonathan's time to get COFF32
merged and
obsolete Optlink altogether.
If we obsoleted the OMF format output we would need to have a
free and distributed with PE-COFF linker. If we can do this, I
think Walter might go along with it.
Unless of course we could convince Microsoft to have a
download just for the linker. We could download that in e.g.
the installer. Would be better than a full install.
I don't think dmd comes with a COFF64 linker now, users are
just told to install Visual Studio or the Windows SDK for a
linker. No reason you can't do the same with COFF32. Optlink
can stick around with OMF for a couple releases. I suspect
nobody would use it when given the choice of COFF32 support.
I think it's important to ship with a linker without requiring
any further installation. One of the things that helped me to
learn D was being able to download DMD and run RDMD on Windows
without installing anything else. It's not obvious to very new
users who don't come from a Windows C++ background where you can
get a gratis Microsoft compiler or how to configure it. If we
were going to switch to COFF32, it would be a big bonus to ship a
COFF32 linker in the installer.
