bugzilla 424 - Unexpected OPTLINK Termination - solved!

[Yigal Chripun]

On 04/11/2009 00:18, Walter Bright wrote:
> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> Once Optlink is moved to C and than D, it could grow new features like
>> link-time optimizations.
>
> It does open up a lot of possibilities.
>
> One I think would be of big benefit is for two COMDATs with different
> names, but the same contents, being merged. This would eliminate a lot
> of template bloat.
>
> Currently, COMDATs are merged if and only if their names match exactly.
>
> Another possibility is to merge the linker with dmd, so it can generate
> executables directly without having to go through an object file step.

Merging the linker with DMD is an excellent idea. There still should be 
a flag to generate object files, but in general there are only two 
useful artifacts the compiler should generate: executable and lib.
I'd want to see also integration of DDL or something similar in concept 
so the libs generated by DMD could be used as shared libs.

Another feature that would be nice to have is incremental compilation. 
each time you run dmd it would update the previous lib file with the 
delta of changes instead of regenerating it from scratch.