Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 07, 2012 23:07:11 Mars wrote:
> On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 11:53:56 UTC, Manu wrote:
> > Personally, I just want to be able to link like a normal
> > windows developer.
> > My code is C/C++, built with VC, and I want to link my D app
> > against those
> > libs using the VC linker, and debug with Visual Studio. This is
> > the
> > workflow I think the vast majority of Windows devs will expect,
> > and it
> > sounds simple enough. This is the only thing standing between
> > me using D
> > for any major projects, and just experimenting with the
> > language for
> > evaluation, or just academic interest.
> > 64bit is far less important to me personally, VisualC linker
> > compatibility
> > is the big one. I just want to link against my C code without
> > jumping
> > through lots of hoops.
> 
> That's exactly my problem... and although I love D, these hurdles
> made me take a step back, to C++, while I wait for this to
> change, so I can finally use D efficiently.
> 
> I'm sure this isn't a trivial task, but the problematic isn't new
> after all. Why hasn't it been addressed yet? In my eyes this
> should be a top priority, to make it easier for new users to get
> into D. Till this poll I actually believed the problem was that D
> isn't used much by Windows users.

I don' think that Walter really views it as much of a problem - or if he does, 
he didn't used to. Remember that he's used to an environment where he doesn't 
use Visual Studio or Microsoft's C++ compiler. And his customers use dmc just 
like he does (since they're his customers), so many of the people that he 
interacts with in the C/C++ world are not necessarily particularly Microsoft-
centric on Windows.

Add to that the enormous task that it is to actually make dmd work with COFF 
or 64-bit or anything of the sort on Windows, and it's no wonder that it 
hasn't happened yet.

To be fair, there are plenty of other things that have needed to be done, and 
what we have for Windows does work, even if it's suboptimal. So, it's not all 
that unreasonable that the issue would be put off as long as it has been. And 
Walter _has_ been slowing working on porting optlink to C (the fact that it's 
written in assembly makes it really fast but hard to maintain and change), 
which would make it possible to then start porting stuff to 64-bit and 
considering COFF and stuff like that.

I expect that we'll get there eventually, but there's so much to do, and this 
particular issue is not only hard, but there's pretty much only one person 
currently qualified to do it, so it hasn't happened yet.

- Jonathan M Davis