Any plans for PE/COFF support? about mold

[rui314]

@bencz I know how hard or easy it is to write a linker for Windows from scratch because I did that before. I'm the creator of the LLVM lld linker for Windows. It's not too difficult to write a linker that works 95% of the time, but making a linker that can be used for production isn't an easy task.

[rui314]

I hope to add a PE/COFF support to mold, but to be honest there's currently no concrete plan to do that. I strongly believe that I can make a significantly faster linker for Windows just like I did for Unix with lld and mold, but that's going to be another one-person-year project, so I can't promise to do that now.

[bencz]

@santagada
@rui314 I haven't read your project's code yet, but implementing support to generate, for example, MZPE file ( Windows Executable ), is relatively simple, the format appears to be complex, but it's not...
Check this code examples from my repo:
https://github.com/bencz/cc/blob/main/cc.c ( this is a tiny C compiler, that generates a Windows MZ-PE file )
https://github.com/bencz/CoffLib ( a lib. in C# to generate a MZ-PE files too, it is a lib. to help to write compilers for Windows )
https://github.com/bencz/SimpleExeMaker ( a simple program in C++ to generate a MZ-PE file too )

Another point, when you release your book, let us know!

There is a little known book where the writer and developer describes a way to implement a C compiler: https://www.t3x.org/reload/index.html

Another book where the implementation of a C compiler is presented is in the MMURTL book: http://www.ipdatacorp.com/mmurtl/

[rui314]

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