[fpc-pascal] How to use external linker on windows i386

[Ondrej Pokorny]

On 06.06.2024 11:16, Sven Barth via fpc-pascal wrote:
> Ondrej Pokorny via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> 
> schrieb am Do., 6. Juni 2024, 09:30:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     I am on Windows 64bit, but using the i386 compiler.
>
>     I have to link a 3rd party OBJ file with {$L 'xyz.obj'}.
>
>     With the internal linker I get these errors:
>     Error: COMDAT selection mode 0 not supported (section: "0")
>     Error: Failed reading coff file, invalid section index while
>     reading xyz.obj
>     Error: Associative COMDAT section for section ".rdata" not found
>
>
> Can you provide a small example as a bug report that shows this 
> behavior (preferably also with source for the object file) so that we 
> can improve the internal linker?
>
>
>     So I tried to use the external linker with -Xe and I get these errors:
>     Linking myProgram.exe
>     ld: warning: directory not found for option '-L/usr/lib'
>     ld: warning: directory not found for option
>     '-F/System/Library/Frameworks/'
>     ld: warning: option -b is obsolete and being ignored
>     ld: file not found: pei-i386
>     Error: Error while linking
>
>
> That reads like the compiler is picking up the wrong linker (a WSL one 
> perhaps?). The ld.exe (probably with platform prefix) should already 
> be located in the compiler's binary directory and PATH needs to point 
> to that first.

Thank you Sven for the help!

I changed the PATH so that the FPC bin directory is the first entry and 
the output indeed changed: I get only "Error: Error while linking" 
output without additional information that I got before.

Furthermore, I see from the docs that the -XR isn't supported on Windows 
(https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/user/userap1.html)
-XR<x>     Prepend <x> to all linker search paths (BeOS, Darwin, 
FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris)

Maybe it would be good to support it on Windows as well to be able to 
explicitly tell which linker to use.

Ondrej
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