DMD + msvc

[Adam Wilson]

Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/19/2012 7:16 AM, Rene Zwanenburg wrote:
>> On Monday, 18 June 2012 at 17:51:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 6/17/2012 3:34 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>>> 1. DMD can only output OMF binaries
>>>> 2. DMD cannot output 64bit code for Windows
>>>> 3. DMD is not compatible with the MSVC linker or runtime
>>>
>>>
>>> I intend to fix all of those, at least for 64 bit Windows, in the
>>> near term.
>>
>> COFF and 64 bit support for windows are on the top of my wish list for
>> D, so
>> this is great news! A few questions:
>>
>> What do you mean by 'at least for 64 bit windows'? No COFF support when
>> targeting, or building on, 32 bit?
>
> Right. Frankly, I think the future is all 64 bits. That future is
> already here on the Mac, where supporting 32 bits seems more and more of
> a backwater.
>
>
>> 'in the near term': I know it's a hard question, but does that mean a few
>> months, or more like a year?
>
> On the order of months.
>
>> Perhaps we could look into writing a COFF linker in D to replace
>> optlink, that
>> way OMF support can be dropped completely. It'd be cool to have part
>> of the
>> toolchain written in D itself.
>
> I'd love to do that, but I can't spare the month or so to do it.

Is there any reason we the community could not do this work? You need to 
focus on the compiler. And with the ability to use the linkers available 
on each system, the need for this drops drastically. The primary use 
case would become portability and special case features.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/