DMD - Windows

[Trass3r]

On Sunday, 8 January 2012 at 00:27:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/7/2012 6:00 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> Will dmd still produce OMF or will it be changed to produce 
>> COFF?
>
> It will be irrelevant, as the linker will read whatever it puts 
> out, and the linker will read COFF.
>
> There is no reason why a linker cannot transparently read many 
> object and library file formats. I even want the linker to be 
> able to read a DLL and figure out how to interface it without 
> needing to build a corresponding import library.
>
> There's quite a bit that can be done that was impractical for 
> linkers of yore because of severe memory constraints.

Yet you are the only one who can maintain optlink, just as you 
are the only one who can process pull requests. The latter is 
much more important, especially since there already are stable 
alternative linkers with more features.

e.g. https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/375 fixes 
severe bugs with postblits/destructors and has been open for 4 
months already without any comment from your side. We have to 
live with the fact that bugs are fixed somewhat randomly (i.e. 
the bugzilla voting system is completely ignored), but it isn't 
acceptable that we have to deal with bugs that have been fixed 
months ago but just not merged yet. Bug 314 is a prime example 
for all of that (most voted bug for years, fixed in ldc long ago, 
pull request was open for ages).
Also the dmd code needs improvement. It should leverage C++11 
features, become more modular and code quality needs to be 
improved. For example the typed Array was long overdue, yet 
people still use that crappy tdata() syntax instead of just []. 
The C++11 range based for loop would be a logical next step for 
that. Other things that come to my mind are replacing hard-coded 
values with proper constants, introducing smart pointers so at 
least some memory is released and better (documentation) comments.