Seemingly patternless optlink premature termination

[Jerry via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 9 January 2017 at 01:26:48 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On Sunday, 8 January 2017 at 19:15:49 UTC, Jerry wrote:
>> A bit more maddening that D is still trying to support 
>> optlink, a linker that
>> hasn't seen a commit in 2 years when it is hardly bug free.
>
>
> Optlink has had many bugs fixed in it. There are currently 7 
> open issues with it on bugzilla:
>
> https://issues.dlang.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&component=dmd&list_id=212971&query_format=advanced&short_desc=optlink&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr
>
> This includes the issue in this thread. Only 1 of the other 
> issues looks like a bug in Optlink.

There's more, just the bugs are so obscure the people filing the 
bugs don't know that the problem lies with Optlink. There's 
problems with shared libraries not being loaded and unloaded 
properly. Random crashes during runtime, more often crashes when 
a debugger is attached. Some more that I ran into as well before 
I switched away from optlink. What point is there to report these 
bugs though, Microsoft's linker works with fewer bugs and 
actually supports the format of the platform. So no need to 
convert .lib files with it. This is my point, it's just one more 
thing that has to be maintained, but it's not even being 
maintained. Supporting MinGW would be a better option as then you 
don't have to maintain the linker and not have it degrade over 
time.

> If you know of unreported issues with Optlink, please report 
> them to bugzilla.

To what end? There isn't even an Optlink specific bug list. Look 
at the bug with Optlink related to data that has more than 16 MB. 
What happened with that? Was that known bug fixed? No, a 
limitation was introduced into DMD to accommodate Optlink's bug. 
Rather than doing the sane decision to fix the bug in Optlink. 
Why? Probably because no one wants to deal with assembly.