On 8 March 2012 00:21, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, March 07, 2012 23:07:11 Mars wrote: > > On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 11:53:56 UTC, Manu wrote: > > > Personally, I just want to be able to link like a normal > > > windows developer. > > > My code is C/C++, built with VC, and I want to link my D app > > > against those > > > libs using the VC linker, and debug with Visual Studio. This is > > > the > > > workflow I think the vast majority of Windows devs will expect, > > > and it > > > sounds simple enough. This is the only thing standing between > > > me using D > > > for any major projects, and just experimenting with the > > > language for > > > evaluation, or just academic interest. > > > 64bit is far less important to me personally, VisualC linker > > > compatibility > > > is the big one. I just want to link against my C code without > > > jumping > > > through lots of hoops. > > > > That's exactly my problem... and although I love D, these hurdles > > made me take a step back, to C++, while I wait for this to > > change, so I can finally use D efficiently. > > > > I'm sure this isn't a trivial task, but the problematic isn't new > > after all. Why hasn't it been addressed yet? In my eyes this > > should be a top priority, to make it easier for new users to get > > into D. Till this poll I actually believed the problem was that D > > isn't used much by Windows users. > > I don' think that Walter really views it as much of a problem - or if he > does, > he didn't used to. Remember that he's used to an environment where he > doesn't > use Visual Studio or Microsoft's C++ compiler. And his customers use dmc > just > like he does (since they're his customers), so many of the people that he > interacts with in the C/C++ world are not necessarily particularly > Microsoft- > centric on Windows. > > Add to that the enormous task that it is to actually make dmd work with > COFF > or 64-bit or anything of the sort on Windows, and it's no wonder that it > hasn't happened yet. > > To be fair, there are plenty of other things that have needed to be done, > and > what we have for Windows does work, even if it's suboptimal. So, it's not > all > that unreasonable that the issue would be put off as long as it has been. > And > Walter _has_ been slowing working on porting optlink to C (the fact that > it's > written in assembly makes it really fast but hard to maintain and change), > which would make it possible to then start porting stuff to 64-bit and > considering COFF and stuff like that. >
Is it possible to just fix the compiler to output COFF objects *without* touching optlink at all? I'm not interested in using optlink with this feature, I intend to link with Visual Studio, that's the whole point. So ignoring optlink, that's a major slice of work taken out of the equation... Maybe it would be nice to support optlink in future, but it seems the priority is backwards. > I expect that we'll get there eventually, but there's so much to do, and > this > particular issue is not only hard, but there's pretty much only one person > currently qualified to do it, so it hasn't happened yet. > > - Jonathan M Davis >