Optlink is on github

[Walter Bright]

On 3/7/2013 7:27 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message
> news:khblbe$27f5$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> On 3/7/2013 7:09 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>>> Good, but does the code still increase the difficulty in porting?
>>
>> I don't understand your question.
>>
>
> Does the presence of support for eg. linking OS2 executables make the
> codebase harder to understand?

Yes.


>> That's correct. However, it'll be much more maintainable,
>
> I don't know how much redesign you're planning, but I can't imagine it ever
> being as maintainable as a pure d codebase.  A less stable/complete linker
> that attracts more contributors should overtake a more stable linker with
> only a couple of developers that grok it.

That's true, but we don't have that other linker yet.

The other thing is, we just don't have a need for our own linker for any 
platform other than win32. So what's the cost benefit moving forward? I think 
it's easier to just fix optlink's bugs.

I don't want to discourage people from trying to come up with a replacement 
linker for win32 written in D. I think that is a great project. But while a 
linker is a conceptually simple program, the awful file formats involved make it 
unnecessarily difficult and there are simply a lot of details and other things 
one has to do.

Like I said before, it'll take a sustained and determined effort to come up with 
a viable replacement for optlink.


> What is the license on optlink?

Same as the dmd back end.


> Can other linkers actually use this information?

They can use the information, yes, but not the code.