Owen Anderson wrote:
There's nothing particularly stopping you from having your installation package include copies of gas and ld,
I disagree. gas and ld are not available on Windoze, except via MinGW. Yes I can make or tell my customers to install MinGW, but if MinGW is installed, then I don't need LLVM. (More about this further ahead)
You're welcome to think that, and I'm welcome to think that your demands are unrealistic.
Obviously!! Everyone already knew that you are entitled to your own opinion, there was no need for you to say that.
See, this is the part where you throw people. You keep stating that you really want to use LLVM, but this kind of statement makes it sound like you don't really care.
What you interpret as me not caring about LLVM is actually me being forced to be practical in a real-world situation.
Anyway, why does it matter whether or not I care about LLVM? Am I required to be in love with a project before I can contribute any feedback to it?
I'm going to let you in on a reality of open source development: if you really particularly want some feature, you might have to end up writing it yourself.
Obviously!! I already knew that, but before I can even consider writing it myself, I must first discuss the issue with developers on the mailing list, and that is what I was doing.
Showing up and demanding that they be done for you isn't going to get you anywhere
I was not demanding anything. Rather I was providing feedback and constructive criticism, as I said. Look at what I actually wrote in my earlier message:
"It would be wonderful if support for the 3 container formats could be finished/implemented."
Does that sound like a demand to you? Are you really sure you want to claim that saying "It would be wonderful if..." constitutes a DEMAND?
I do think your expectation that we're all going to drop what we're doing in order to embark on multi-year projects to replace underlying system tools [...] is unrealistic.
I didn't have that expectation, and I never said or implied that I did, so it is strange that you say that.
By the way, it is NOT "multi-year projects". I agree with what Holger Schurig said:
"[...] So it is actually possible to do this with limited resources (the FPC developer community isn't that large). It just has to be done."
Also, Nick Lewycky said that there is ALREADY an unfinished ELFWriter and MachOWriter in lib/Codegen/ !
Owen Anderson wrote:
You, as the developer, install/build binutils in MinGW. Then you pull the executables out and stick them in the package that you give your clients. Thus the clients don't need MinGW.
Interesting suggestion, how confident are you that that will be successful? I have doubts that the binutils in MinGW can be executed and used successfully without the rest of MinGW being present. I wonder if your suggestion amounts to starting a "Micro-MinGW" fork of MinGW, similar to how MinGW started as a fork of Cygwin.
Also there are possibly licensing problems -- it is worth noting that LLVM and MinGW are under different (and possibly incompatible) licenses.
If your suggestion does amount to me starting a "Micro-MinGW" fork of MinGW, then I would think my efforts would be better directed at helping to finish/implement the PEWriter, ELFWriter, MachOWriter in LLVM, and then that work would be under the LLVM license.
But if MinGW or Cygwin is installed, then I have no need for LLVM !!
This is not the case. Having MinGW/Cygwin installed != having GCC installed.
Quoting Wikipedia: "MinGW [...] is a native software port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to Microsoft Windows along with a set of freely distributable import libraries and header files for the Windows API"