Optlink is on github

[Rikki Cattermole]

On Friday, 8 March 2013 at 04:17:03 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
> On 3/7/2013 7:41 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/7/2013 7:27 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>>> "Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message
>>> news:khblbe$27f5$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>> On 3/7/2013 7:09 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>>>> That's correct. However, it'll be much more maintainable,
>>>
>>> I don't know how much redesign you're planning, but I can't 
>>> imagine it ever
>>> being as maintainable as a pure d codebase.  A less 
>>> stable/complete linker
>>> that attracts more contributors should overtake a more stable 
>>> linker with
>>> only a couple of developers that grok it.
>> 
>> That's true, but we don't have that other linker yet.
>> 
>> The other thing is, we just don't have a need for our own 
>> linker for any platform other than win32. So what's the cost
>> benefit moving forward? I think it's easier to just fix 
>> optlink's bugs.
>> 
>> I don't want to discourage people from trying to come up with 
>> a replacement linker for win32 written in D. I think that
>> is a great project. But while a linker is a conceptually 
>> simple program, the awful file formats involved make it
>> unnecessarily difficult and there are simply a lot of details 
>> and other things one has to do.
>> 
>> Like I said before, it'll take a sustained and determined 
>> effort to come up with a viable replacement for optlink.
>
> Personally, even though I don't use win32, I believe that 
> moving it over to use the VS toolchain and runtime is the
> right path forward.

I've actually modified dmd's frontend to support using the VS 
tool chain for linking 32 bit executables. But I didn't 
understand the backend to seperate the 32bit binary generation vs 
64bit. I believe it shouldn't be too much. But I really don't 
understand it so if anyone is willing to help on this.
I haven't broken 64bit generation as far as I know. Because I 
added a cli argument (-msvc) which is enabled for -m64 
automatically on Windows.