tooling quality and some random rant

[Denis Koroskin]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:12:02 +0300, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> 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.

What's wrong with parsing low-level linker error messages and output them  
in human-readable form? E.g. demangle missing symbols.