TypeInfo and bloated exes - is MingGW toolchain the answer?

[Sean Kelly]

kris wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> It seems to me that the MinGW tools are pretty much the best and only 
>> hope if you are going to abandon OMF and OptLink.
> 
> Yesterday, there were strong claims made about the DM Win32 obj-format 
> (OMF) being compatible with a number of different linkers. I'm surprised 
> it is so hard to track one down?

Perhaps not so surprising given the age of the OMF format.  DMC/DMD are 
the only compilers I know of that still use it.

>> Personally, I don't see why on Windows you'd want to use anything 
>> other than Microsoft's format.  Especially now that you can get their 
>> latest C++ compiler for free.  Intel's super-optimized compiler is 
>> also compatible with this format.  Probably others are as well.
> 
> Very true. One big question (that's been asked several times before) is 
> "how does DM expect to support 64-bit on Win32"? Perhaps OMF will have 
> to be dumped one way or another?

I suspect it will, but that's more a hunch than an authoritative claim.

>> Other than the GPL license, it seems like the MinGW tools have 
>> everything one could hope for.  Is the license the only real problem?
> 
> Is it 64-bit compliant?

I think the license may turn out to be more of an issue as far as DMD is 
concerned.  Why work to generate code for an object file format you 
don't have the software to link?  Or is it perhaps not a tremendous 
amount of work (which seems unlikely) and the format could be specified 
via a compiler flag?


Sean