Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Manu]

On 8 March 2012 00:21, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Is it possible to just fix the compiler to output COFF objects *without*
touching optlink at all?
I'm not interested in using optlink with this feature, I intend to link
with Visual Studio, that's the whole point. So ignoring optlink, that's a
major slice of work taken out of the equation...
Maybe it would be nice to support optlink in future, but it seems the
priority is backwards.



> 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
>
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