Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, October 27, 2017 09:46:21 Kagamin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 27 October 2017 at 01:40:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > The problem is that to reasonably interact with the rest of the
> > Windows C/C++ ecosystem, you're pretty much stuck using
> > Microsoft's linker. If we can get that without pulling in all
> > of VS, all the better, but without the linker, we can't link
> > with most existing C/C++ code, which is a big problem.
>
> How so? curl is an import library for libcurl.dll, mingw handles
> import libraries just fine, same for zlib and mxWidgets. But most
> of the time you only need to link phobos and some code from dub
> and that's all.

I don't know anything about import libraries, but we need to be able to link
against any C/C++ libraries that someone is doing with VS. If mingw can do
that, then it could be an option, though a lot more Windows devs are going
to have VS than mingw, and it's my understanding that you have to pull in a
fair bit of stuff for mingw (though presumably, it's not as big as VS), so I
don't know how much of an improvement that would be.

But the key thing here is that it needs to be easy and straightforward to
link against the C/C++ libraries that are generally available for Windows
and which folks are writing for their own projects, and that means being
compatible with Microsoft and its linker.

- Jonathan M Davis