Akakima wrote:
Making optlink open source won't make any difference. Few are skilled at
asm anymore, and likely none of them would want to work on optlink for
free.
That's true. But the real problem is not optlink. Optlink is a very good
linker.
The problem is OMF. 11 years ago OMF was a good choice. But not anymore.
I know you are a competent (probably very competent) compiler writer. You
modified D on linux, so it produce ELF. How much time would that take to
modify DMD so it produce COFF ? Given all the bad publicity OMF gives to D,
it should be viewed as a good choice.
There are many (not much), but there are open source linkers. Of course ld
is not as fast as optlink, but it's good. And there is a faster version made
by the project Ultimate++ IDE.
Going to COFF would have a lot of advantages for everybody and for D.
Do you agree ?
Changing the object module format is not sufficient. The symbolic debug info
would have to be changed (and Microsoft's is undocumented) and then there's the
dependency on Microsoft's C runtime library if linking with VC generated object
files.
