linker wrapper

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:

> bearophile wrote:
> > A new fresh trouble, I think I have already seen about 10-15 persons ask this question in D.learn:
> > http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=22772
> 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/OptlinkErrorMessages.html#symbol_undefined

Probably we'll see more people asking for that kind of help. Not all D newbies come from languages that use a linker. Today a significant and growing percentage of newbie D programmers come from Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, etc. The linker is currently present in the D world, and you can't hide this fact (but simpler to understand error messages will probably help a lot).

My preferred (partial) solution to that problem is to let DMD look by itself for the modules it needs to compile a program, unless a compiler switch asks otherwise and restores the simpler basic behaviour. This helps D newbies, people that write small programs, and causes exactly zero troubles to people that compile large D programs or people that want partial compilation anyway. This doesn't solve all linker troubles, because linker errors may have other causes, but removes the most common one for D newbies and is useful for other purposes too.

Bye,
bearophile