dmd's linking order

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:47:19 -0400, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2012-04-11 10:37, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
>> I have no idea. If they always need to be in a particular order, then  
>> we can
>> just make dmd put the user provide ones in the correct spot, but if it  
>> varies
>> depending on the flags, then either dmd is going to have to know which  
>> flags go
>> in which order (assuming that it can), or there's no way to solve the  
>> problem
>> without introducing new flags to dmd to give you more control over  
>> linking
>> order or just using the linker directly.
>>
>> Unfortunately, I have no idea why the linking order even matters in the  
>> first
>> place, so I can't really say what we need to do here. Hopefully,  
>> someone else
>> around here _does_ know. But the issue does seem to need to be brought  
>> up.
>
> I also finds it strange that linking order should matter.

It was a recent change in ld, it happened to me when I upgraded to ubutu  
11.10.

See this bug:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6822

I remember this behavior from old systems I used to work on (really old,  
like SunOS 4).

I'm not a linker expert, but I found this page which describes the changes  
and the reasoning:

See this post: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyNarwhal/ToolchainTransition

My suggestion is to allow specifying in the dmd.conf file the specific  
location of phobos/druntime in the link order, then leave the -L options  
at the front.

-Steve