Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, March 08, 2012 11:12:01 Manu wrote:
> Is it possible to just fix the compiler to output COFF objects *without*
> touching optlink at all?

I have no idea. In principle, I would think so, but I don't know. But dmd 
would have to be altered so that you could choose the object format rather 
than being simply switched over to COFF regardless. Ideally, it would be 
modular enough to be able to make it output any format you like with plugins 
or somesuch, but I have no idea how it's designed. And therein is the largest 
problem regardless. Walter is probably the only person who knows the backend 
well enough to do anything like this. So, regardless of what the situation 
with optlink is, it's almost certainly going to require Walter, who's busy 
with plenty of other stuff which is also very important.

If someone could make the changes themselves and create a pull request for it, 
then we could probably get COFF, but that would require someone knowledgeable 
enough to do that, and I don't think that anyone other than Walter really is. 
If someone other than Walter is going to do it, then they've got a lot to 
learn, and no one has taken the time to do that.

- Jonathan M Davis