X86_mscoff / x86_64 as default for dub projects (windows)

[kinke]

On Thursday, 6 December 2018 at 17:58:17 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is mostly interesting for windows developers. What is your 
> opinion of switching to architecture x86_mscoff or x86_64 as 
> default on windows?
>
> To be pretty clear, you still can compile to x86 OMF by setting 
> the default architecture either in settings.json or as command 
> line argument. The proposal is just to set another default.

I also think this is long overdue - but I wouldn't change dub's 
defaults, but DMD's instead (something like `-m32` on Windows 
meaning `-m32mscoff`, and a new `-m32omf` switch). It's a 
breaking change, but definitely worth it IMO. Besides optlink 
bugs and limitations, and the executable unfortunately being 
named `link.exe` and so conflicting with the MS one (and people 
running into problems when using LDC, depending on their PATH), I 
see the primary drawback in that probably > 99.9% of 3rd-party 
libraries out there are in COFF format (I haven't heard of that 
old OMF format from DOS times before playing with DMD).