bugzilla 424 - Unexpected OPTLINK Termination - solved!

[Walter Bright]

Optlink is written entirely in rather impenetrable assembler code, and 
is resistant to understanding and modification. Hence, over the last few 
months I've been very slowly converting it to C, function by function.

One might ask, why not convert it to D? The answer is that I don't have 
a good test suite for optlink, so I have to be very very careful to not 
make a mistake in the translation. That means do one function at a time, 
rebuild, and retest, which means the compiled C code has to match the 
segment, naming and calling conventions used in optlink. I made a custom 
version of the dmc compiler to do this. Also, C can be made to work 
without any runtime library support at all, and since optlink does not 
use the C runtime library, this is useful.

Once it is in C and working, it will be trivial to translate it to D and 
start rewriting it.

Anyhow, during this process I stumbled upon what the problem was. 
Optlink was apparently trying to account for some Borland obscure 
extension to the OMF. Remove this, and it works, although presumably it 
will no longer link Borland object files (who cares!).

The fix will go out in the next update, if you need it sooner please 
email me.