Optlink Contribution

[Daniel Murphy via Digitalmars-d]

"Jonathan Marler"  wrote in message 
news:xrpdzjuaxtdhyfhpsgcu at forum.dlang.org...

> I like the discussion.  I do want to remind everyone that OPTLINK is very 
> fast and switching to a different linker will likely result performance 
> hit.  There are advantages to using COFF as it seems more compilers use 
> that format and D would be more interoperable with other compilers and 
> languages.  I think every peice of software has it's own goals which 
> determine what tradeoffs to chose.  In my view, the linker should 1) 
> always work and 2) be as fast as possible.  OPTLINK passes number 2 with 
> flying colors but is does have bugs.  This is obviously due to the fact 
> that it is written in assembly but keep in mind that the performance of 
> the linker affects everyone who uses D.  Any performance hit on the linker 
> will be seen in every single build of any D program. Adding 1 second to 
> link time will add 1 second to build time since this process cannot be 
> parallelized (as far as I know).

Optlink simply doesn't do enough.  It doesn't support modern debug info 
formats.  It doesn't support mixing omf and coff object files (this is 
probably the most requested feature, because it would allow using the stock 
import libraries).

Worst of all, optlink is hostile to change.

win32 is dying, and optlink will certainly die with it.  Having a more 
accessible linker will let us adapt much faster.