Windows dev anyone? [was: Re: Signed DMD binaries]

[Martin Nowak]

On 08/17/2018 01:24 AM, Mike Franklin wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 August 2018 at 17:06:27 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> 
>> A review would be helpful.
> 
> It looks fine to me, though, that's not saying much.  If you need
> someone to test something, contact me on Slack.
> 
>> And more Windows dev-volunteers for upcoming features.
> 
> To do what exactly?

Well from my point of view the most important outstanding Windows tasks are:

- help to test, debug, and fix the experimental lld/mingw toolchain
  (https://dlang.org/changelog/2.079.0.html#lld_mingw)

  Once this is ready for production use it would simplify the Windows
installation and allowed us to drop optlink and OMF.

- help Benjamin Thaut with the export feature

  This is intended to cover dllimport/dllexport, but in a single keyword
without macros (more info https://dconf.org/2016/talks/thaut.html).
  It's a necessity for full DLL support on Windows and we also want to
use explicitly exported symbols to speed up Posix binaries (by avoiding
PLT indirections).

- get a 64-bit VC dmd.exe into the release

  64-bit builds should be fully CI-integrated (mostly already done via
AppVeyor AFAIK).
  Integrate build script/makefile with existing Windows release build
(https://github.com/dlang/installer/blob/f7ee5aeab79a800317d875b5ee2e34ec2ad8803c/create_dmd_release/build_all.d#L41-L43,
and
https://github.com/dlang/installer/blob/f7ee5aeab79a800317d875b5ee2e34ec2ad8803c/create_dmd_release/create_dmd_release.d#L444).

I'd be happy to add anyone remotely interested in Windows-support to our
#Windows channel on slack (https://dlang.slack.com/messages/C6D5FEJ78).
It's unfortunately fairly quiet atm.

-Martin