On Tue Aug 23 09:27:43 2022 +0000, R��mi Bernon wrote:
Well for instance having an open-source, drop-in replacement alternative to midl.exe.
I think that it would be generally more interesting to make widl
itself more compatible with midl. Yes, I agree, though then it'd possibly break backward compatibility. I'm not sure we want that as widl is used publicly elsewhere. Having a builtin midl.exe (and possibly a Unix version of it) would be a better way to get a command-line compatible tool, improving widl at the same time for things that do not break backward compatibility, but eventually deprecating it once the other is in good shape.
widl can already be used as a drop-in midl replacement in some cases, for example when building Firefox (and we recently started using it for Gecko). It works because I fixed compatibility in required aspects, see commits like 1db0ad9798f, 511b50e7bf, fc761cb9352d. I don't see why we can't support more options like that. If we run into a backward compatibility problem, we may always add a way to be more explicit about midl/widl compatibility mode. Do you have some specific problems in mind?