On Friday, October 27, 2017 09:46:21 Kagamin via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On Friday, 27 October 2017 at 01:40:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis > > wrote: > > The problem is that to reasonably interact with the rest of the > > Windows C/C++ ecosystem, you're pretty much stuck using > > Microsoft's linker. If we can get that without pulling in all > > of VS, all the better, but without the linker, we can't link > > with most existing C/C++ code, which is a big problem. > > How so? curl is an import library for libcurl.dll, mingw handles > import libraries just fine, same for zlib and mxWidgets. But most > of the time you only need to link phobos and some code from dub > and that's all.
I don't know anything about import libraries, but we need to be able to link against any C/C++ libraries that someone is doing with VS. If mingw can do that, then it could be an option, though a lot more Windows devs are going to have VS than mingw, and it's my understanding that you have to pull in a fair bit of stuff for mingw (though presumably, it's not as big as VS), so I don't know how much of an improvement that would be. But the key thing here is that it needs to be easy and straightforward to link against the C/C++ libraries that are generally available for Windows and which folks are writing for their own projects, and that means being compatible with Microsoft and its linker. - Jonathan M Davis