What's up, RMers?

[kyonides]

While working on the cross compilation of mkxpplus in order to run it on Windows later on, I met a strange guest, the mingw ld linker app. As you might know a compiler isn't just a compiler, you need a toolchain to compile stuff in programming languages like C, C++, Objective C or C++, C#, Fortran, CPython, etc. AFAIK it requires a cmake utility, the make applet, probably a subset of cmake or vice versa, the "actual" compiler, if it's not a link to the cc or c++ library install on your system, and the linker, a small app that will let you merge everything into a single shared library, static library or binary executable (bin, so, exe, app, appbundle). Sometimes stuff like ar utility might be called out to make an object file called a or ar file, or there's some utility to compile a resource res file as well. Everything was going as... usual still this guest of mind came up with its own plans for the weekend: it would refuse to find required libraries, making it impossible to link the involved files and let them become one as I once expected. I can't completely blame it, I still need to fix one last bug to make it work normally (hopefully). Even so it caused me severe headaches whenever it refused to find zlib or gmp or Ruby libraries that have been there for quite a while now. Curiously the default Linux ld app didn't have any problem with looking for the equivalent versions of those libraries. Of course the binary executable wouldn't work then because it was linked as a Linux like executable file.

Yeah, I filed a bug report to the very same maintainers' bug list, if I didn't make any mistake there, just in case they can tell what the hell happened to my mingw ld linker that has become a stubborn kid for no good reason. =_=