On Monday, 20 April 2015 at 18:26:16 UTC, Jeremiah DeHaan wrote:
Oh, huh. For some reason I thought that DMD was doing its own code generation and only needed a linker for putting it all together. I didn't know that it needed another compiler to work. It looks like I have more to learn about the D compiler.
DMD does do all its own code generation, the C compiler is only needed for a few C files that are bundled with druntime and phobos, such as zlib. Since the C compiler is only needed to build druntime/phobos for Win64 and not when distributing dmd for Win64, it's not as important as the COFF64 linker and C library.
The D devs can always download Visual Studio when building the dmd release, compile those C files, and not require users to get Visual Studio. Of course, this assumes that there aren't any incompatibilities between COFF64 code generated by the Microsoft C compiler and your COFF64 linker and C library.
The toolchain I am suggesting does include a C compiler that works for both 32 and 64 bit MSCOFF, so it sounds like it could be feasible, but whether it is worth it or not is a different story.
Huh, looks like you have everything you need then. :)
