Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:05:34 +0200, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:Vladimir Panteleev wrote:On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 07:20:56 +0200, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2011/01/18/what-makes-a-programming-language-good/So, why do users still get a scary linker error when they try to compile a program with more than 1 module?What is that message?C:\Temp\D\Build> dmd test1.d OPTLINK (R) for Win32 Release 8.00.8 Copyright (C) Digital Mars 1989-2010 All rights reserved. http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/optlink.html test1.obj(test1) Error 42: Symbol Undefined _D5test21fFZv --- errorlevel 1 1) The error message is very technical:a) does not indicate what exactly is wrong (module not passed to linker, not that the linker knows that)
There could be many reasons for the error, see: http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/OptlinkErrorMessages.html#symbol_undefined which is linked from the url listed: http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/optlink.html and more directly from the FAQ: http://www.digitalmars.com/faq.html
b) does not give any indication of what the user has to do to fix it
The link above does give such suggestions, depending on what the cause of the error is.
2) OPTLINK doesn't demangle D mangled names, when it could, and it would improve the readability of its error messages considerably. (I know not all mangled names are demangleable, but it'd be a great improvement regardless)
The odd thing is that Optlink did demangle the C++ mangled names, and people actually didn't like it that much.
dmd can build entire programs with one command: dmd file1.d file2.d file3.d ...etc...That doesn't scale anywhere. What if you want to use a 3rd-party library with a few dozen modules?
Just type the filenames and library names on the command line. You can put hundreds if you like. If you do blow up the command line processor (nothing dmd can do about that), you can put all those files in a file, say "cmd", and invoke with:
dmd @cmd
The only limit is the amount of memory in your system.
