Unilink - alternative linker for win32/64, DMD OMF extensions?

[Walter Bright]

Akakima wrote:
>> Making optlink open source won't make any difference. Few are skilled at 
>> asm anymore, and likely none of them would want to work on optlink for 
>> free.
> 
> That's true. But the real problem is not optlink. Optlink is a very good 
> linker.
> 
> The problem is OMF. 11 years ago OMF was a good choice. But not anymore.
> 
> I know you are a competent (probably very competent) compiler writer. You 
> modified D on linux, so it produce ELF. How much time would that take to 
> modify DMD so it produce COFF ? Given all the bad publicity OMF gives to D, 
> it should be viewed as a good choice.
> 
> There are many (not much), but there are open source linkers. Of course ld 
> is not as fast as optlink, but it's good. And there is a faster version made 
> by the project Ultimate++ IDE.
> 
> Going to COFF would have a lot of advantages for everybody and for D.
> 
> Do you agree ?

Changing the object module format is not sufficient. The symbolic debug info 
would have to be changed (and Microsoft's is undocumented) and then there's the 
dependency on Microsoft's C runtime library if linking with VC generated object 
files.