"w0rp" wrote in message news:[email protected]...
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.
FWIW this was the plan when I started ylink. I wanted to make a linker that could link omf and coff together, so I could tackle the object-format and runtime-format transitions independently. It does support mscoff32 hello world now, but not much more. Until it has debug info support it's not a viable replacement for optlink unfortunately.
