Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 3/3/2012 12:44 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Bernard Helyer"<b.helyer at gmail.com>  wrote in message
> news:nlzougvwvlvnmjbufwgi at forum.dlang.org...
>>
>> No one thinks that's a bad idea. The trouble is the amount of developers
>> that actually understand the backend enough to implement another object
>> format (which is what's needed to support the VisualC linker) is very
>> small.
>>
>> What's needed is someone to take the time to learn it then do it. Someone
>> motivated, and smart. Not unlike yourself! :P
>>
>
> The problem isn't really the backend - there are currently _three_ full
> object file generators in dmd and it should be possible to use the same
> interfaces these do without caring what most of the backend is really doing.
>

A good step forward would be a better separation of the object file 
format from the target OS and the host OS. Removing that preprocessor 
hell is needed anyway if you want to switch between object file formats 
by a command line switch.
In addition, it would be pretty nice if you could at least compile with 
predefined version OSX, even if you are working on Windows.

> Generating Microsoft coff objects means deciphering the spec to see what
> everything should look like, generating every kind of entry with msvc to see
> what it _actually_ does, then translating all the record/fixup/section types
> from omf to the coff equivalents.  With this (and maybe updates to the
> runtime to use msvc's instead of dmc's c runtime) you have 32 bit coff on
> windows.

Don't forget debug info: as far as I can tell, the Microsoft linker 
accepts codeview debug info in the object file, you don't have to write 
pdb files. From my experience with cv2pdb, the debug records are a 
straight forward extension of the debug info currently written by dmd.