Can we kill the D calling convention already?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at 14:32:13 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen 
wrote:
> On 25-04-2012 15:06, Kagamin wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 24 April 2012 at 10:29:52 UTC, Alex Rønne 
>> Petersen wrote:
>>> The point is just that: Right now I can write assembly that 
>>> will work
>>> on GDC, LDC, and DMD on non-Windows. It will not work for DMD 
>>> on
>>> Windows. Something has to change here.
>>
>> If it doesn't work on Windows, it should be versioned out. 
>> What we have:
>> http://dlang.org/version.html#PredefinedVersions - versions 
>> for LDC,
>> GDC, DMD and Windows - all what you want.
>
> Yes, I added them. :)
>
> You're missing the point. D is providing (or trying to provide) 
> a standard inline assembler, but calling conventions are not 
> standardized enough for it to be useful across compilers. If 
> you're writing inline assembly because you *have* to, you don't 
> just "version it out", you have to write different logic for 
> different compilers, which is a maintenance nightmare.

This is exactly what C++ gets blamed for, yet most people fail to 
realize that the situation is common to all languages that 
generate native code.

The only reason it works out for C, is that the C ABI is actually 
the OS ABI, as such all C compilers tend to have a common ABI.

It would be nice if I could use D libraries without having to 
worry which compiler was used to generate them.