tooling quality and some random rant

[Gary Whatmore]

Paulo Pinto Wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am sorry, but I don't belive it.
> 
> Many other systems programming languages that atempted to displace C and 
> C++, have
> the toolchain built in its languages, after the compilers were bootstrapped, 
> as anyone
> with enough compiler knowledge will surely tell you.
> 
> And D's linker must first be written in C, to make it easy to rewrite in D?!
> 
> A linker is not science fiction, it is just a program that binds object 
> files and libraries together
> to produce an executable. Any programming language able to manipulate files 
> and binary
> data, can be used to create a linker.

If you want, you can prove this by starting a competive linker project. Probably both Digitalmars and Microsoft have done everything they can to make competition as hard as possible by leaving the object file format undocumented and filled the implementation with weird corner cases to make reverse engineering extremely hard. Microsoft even does minor changes in every version to break compatibility.

Even if a 10 man team uses some open source linker as a base and writes the linker in D, you can't beat Walter. The productivity of hardcore domain experts is nearly two orders of magnitude better than that of novices. The toolchain issues will be history by the end of this year.

 - G.W.