Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-03-08 10:12, Manu wrote:
> On 8 March 2012 00:21, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com
> <mailto: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.

DMD would need to be compatible with the Microsoft linker and runtime as 
well, that is, except from outputting object file in the correct format.


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg