Optlink Contribution

[w0rp via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 09:17:05 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 09:06:11 UTC, Rikki Cattermole 
> wrote:
>> On 30/07/2014 8:58 p.m., Joakim wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 08:12:17 UTC, Rikki Cattermole 
>>> wrote:
>>>> On 30/07/2014 7:03 p.m., Kagamin wrote:
>>>>> Making dmd generate coff would make more sense.
>>>> +1
>>>> Most of the code should already be present in dmd, which 
>>>> makes it far
>>>> crazier not to.
>>>
>>> What makes it craziest is that there's a COFF32 branch lying 
>>> around that
>>> nobody merges:
>>>
>>> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/mailman.1560.1323886804.24802.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com?page=9#post-llldfc:242q6p:241:40digitalmars.com
>>>
>>>
>>> It would be a far better use of Jonathan's time to get COFF32 
>>> merged and
>>> obsolete Optlink altogether.
>>
>> If we obsoleted the OMF format output we would need to have a 
>> free and distributed with PE-COFF linker. If we can do this, I 
>> think Walter might go along with it.
>>
>> Unless of course we could convince Microsoft to have a 
>> download just for the linker. We could download that in e.g. 
>> the installer. Would be better than a full install.
>
> I don't think dmd comes with a COFF64 linker now, users are 
> just told to install Visual Studio or the Windows SDK for a 
> linker.  No reason you can't do the same with COFF32.  Optlink 
> can stick around with OMF for a couple releases.  I suspect 
> nobody would use it when given the choice of COFF32 support.

I think it's important to ship with a linker without requiring 
any further installation. One of the things that helped me to 
learn D was being able to download DMD and run RDMD on Windows 
without installing anything else. It's not obvious to very new 
users who don't come from a Windows C++ background where you can 
get a gratis Microsoft compiler or how to configure it. If we 
were going to switch to COFF32, it would be a big bonus to ship a 
COFF32 linker in the installer.