tooling quality and some random rant

[Walter Bright]

Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:26:50 +0200, Walter Bright 
> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> 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.

It's not impossible, but is a tremendous amount of work in order to improve one 
error message, and one error message that generations of C and C++ programmers 
are comfortable dealing with.