On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:12:02 +0200, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> wrote:
Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:26:50 +0200, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> wrote:
golgeliyele wrote:
I don't think C++ and gcc set a good bar here.
Short of writing our own linker, we're a bit stuck with what ld does.
That's not true. The compiler has knowledge of what symbols will be
passed to the linker, and can display its own, much nicer error
messages. I've mentioned this in our previous discussion on this topic.
Not without reading the .o files passed to the linker, and the
libraries, and figuring out what would be pulled in from those
libraries. In essence, the compiler would have to become a linker.
You are trying to solve a much bigger problem, which indeed sounds like a
lot of effort for something so insignificant. What I'm talking about is
much simpler.
Let's take two cases which will cover over 99% of such cases when using
DMD.
In both cases, the user only passes .d files to DMD, no extra .obj or .lib
files, as is the case most of the time:
1) The user forgot to declare main().
If you don't pass the -c or -lib switches to the compiler, it's reasonable
to expect that the user wants to compile and link an executable. But DMD
knows that there is no D main() symbol in the files passed to it! So it
can print a nice error message without having to run the linker to print
its ugly one.
2) The user didn't pass all of his program's modules to the compiler.
By far the most common cause, we've discussed this one before. It only
requires knowing if a certain module is part of the standard library or
not. Even simply doing it for modules present in the current directory
would help. I know it's not consistent, but neither is import hinting for
certain standard library functions, and both are great ideas.
--
Best regards,
Vladimir mailto:[email protected]
