On Tuesday, October 30, 2012 01:45:31 bearophile wrote: > Andrei Alexandrescu: > > Why can't the linking code be built into dmd? I am baffled :o). > > This is possible, but a better question is how much work is > required to do this? > > Walter was very slowly translating the current linker from > disassembly to C. If and once that program is all C, it's > probably not too much hard to convert it to D, merge it with the > dmd binary, and improve it in some ways.
Depending, it should be fairly easy to just wrap the linker call and have dmd process its output and present something saner when there's an error. That could be a bit fragile though, since it would likely depend on the exact formatting of linker error messages. Better integration than that could be quite a bit more work. I think that it's fairly clear that in the long run, we want something like this, but I don't know if it's worth doing right now or not. - Jonathan M Davis