bugzilla 424 - Unexpected OPTLINK Termination - solved!

[Bill Baxter]

This is the too many fixups bug?!
If so that's great news.

So is it any slower now with things not in ASM?

--bb

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Optlink is written entirely in rather impenetrable assembler code, and is
> resistant to understanding and modification. Hence, over the last few months
> I've been very slowly converting it to C, function by function.
>
> One might ask, why not convert it to D? The answer is that I don't have a
> good test suite for optlink, so I have to be very very careful to not make a
> mistake in the translation. That means do one function at a time, rebuild,
> and retest, which means the compiled C code has to match the segment, naming
> and calling conventions used in optlink. I made a custom version of the dmc
> compiler to do this. Also, C can be made to work without any runtime library
> support at all, and since optlink does not use the C runtime library, this
> is useful.
>
> Once it is in C and working, it will be trivial to translate it to D and
> start rewriting it.
>
> Anyhow, during this process I stumbled upon what the problem was. Optlink
> was apparently trying to account for some Borland obscure extension to the
> OMF. Remove this, and it works, although presumably it will no longer link
> Borland object files (who cares!).
>
> The fix will go out in the next update, if you need it sooner please email
> me.
>