Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, March 08, 2012 17:12:53 Manu wrote:
> On 8 March 2012 16:41, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> By 'runtime' you mean the crt? I don't think that'll be a major headache.
> Probably just a few subtle differences to deal with.
> A nice side effect would be that all those horrid OMF conversions of MS
> libs bundled with D wouldn't be necessary.
> 
> And what else affects linker compatibility other than object format and
> mangling convention?
> 
> How is DMD actually affected by any of this other than object format? Name
> mangling?

As I understand it, Walter used to have it so that dmc (not dmd) could 
generate code compatible with Microsoft's format, but it was such a pain to 
maintain it with the changes that Microsoft kept making that he gave up on it. 
So, I'm not at all certain that anything involved with making dmd compatible 
with COFF is easy or easy to maintain. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be 
done (far from it), but I wouldn't assume that much of anything involved with 
it isn't a big issue (like "just a few subtle differences to deal with"). We 
_might_ be that lucky, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's a major undertaking - 
albeit an important one.

- Jonathan M Davis