Hi,

I've finally gotten round to upgrading my DMD to v2.062 (from v2.059) - running on Win XP.

I've had no issues recompiling the (quite old) DFL library I use with the latest DMD, so went on to rebuild a tool I previously developed (that uses DFL). Everything compiled ok, but the linker choked on my RES file. (This project build fine and worked perfectly on previous versions of DMD up to and including v2.059). The error is:

OPTLINK (R) for Win32  Release 8.00.12
Copyright (C) Digital Mars 1989-2010  All rights reserved.
http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/optlink.html
atrchecker.RES(3) : Error 52: .DEF Syntax Error
DO

^	


I am sure that the "D0" and "^" is suppose to indicate the position of the error, but is pretty useless in this case.

I've googled on ".DEF Syntax Error" and, according to http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/OptlinkErrorMessages.html, this indicates a "An invalid .def file syntax could not be parsed. ", which does not help much at all.

I am pretty confident though that it is not a DEF file issue since I am building a EXE (no DEF should be required). The Tool also builds fine if I remove the RES file from the project.

Googling on "Error 52" bought up nothing substantial either.

The RC file for the RES file is extremely simple:
Code:	

101 ICON DISCARDABLE ".\\Resources\\scope4.ico"

205 BITMAP DISCARDABLE ".\\Resources\\SomeBitmap.bmp"

STRINGTABLE DISCARDABLE
BEGIN
   3001 "....some string!....."
END	


I've tried compiling the RC file with both the MS as well as the DM resource compiler:

For DM:
rcc -32 atrchecker.rc

For MS:
"c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\rc" /r /v atrchecker.rc

The symptoms are exactly the same in both cases.

I can open the RES file with any number of resource editors (including Visual Studio and XN Resource Editor) and they all display the relevant BMPs and ICOs without errors.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Ettienne

On 4/22/13, Ettienne Gilbert <ettienne.gilbert@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any ideas?

Resource scripts can use one of two syntaxes - an older one and a new one, one uses BEG/END, the other { }, and Optlink only supports one of the two.

I think you can use ResEdit[1] to convert the syntax so Optlink can understand it.

[1] : http://www.resedit.net/

On 22.04.2013 14:02, Ettienne Gilbert wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've finally gotten round to upgrading my DMD to v2.062 (from v2.059) -
> running on Win XP.
>
> I've had no issues recompiling the (quite old) DFL library I use with
> the latest DMD, so went on to rebuild a tool I previously developed
> (that uses DFL). Everything compiled ok, but the linker choked on my RES
> file. (This project build fine and worked perfectly on previous versions
> of DMD up to and including v2.059). The error is:
>
> OPTLINK (R) for Win32  Release 8.00.12
> Copyright (C) Digital Mars 1989-2010  All rights reserved.
> http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/optlink.html
> atrchecker.RES(3) : Error 52: .DEF Syntax Error
> DO

I suspect your build script has somehow omitted a ',' from the command line in its invocation of optlink. The usage is

LINK obj[,out[,map[,lib[,def[,res]]]]]

so if a comma misses, your resource file is interpreted as a def file.

If you are invoking the linker through dmd, you might want to check the linker call by adding "-v" to the command line.

On Monday, 22 April 2013 at 12:33:52 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 4/22/13, Ettienne Gilbert <ettienne.gilbert@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Any ideas?
>
> Resource scripts can use one of two syntaxes - an older one and a new
> one, one uses BEG/END, the other { }, and Optlink only supports one of
> the two.
>
> I think you can use ResEdit[1] to convert the syntax so Optlink can
> understand it.
>
> [1] : http://www.resedit.net/

Hi Andrej,

Thanks for the very speedy response. Handy to know about resedit as well, but it turned out that the problem was as Rainer Schuetze suspected.

Regards,
Ettienne

On Monday, 22 April 2013 at 17:51:26 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>
>
> On 22.04.2013 14:02, Ettienne Gilbert wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've finally gotten round to upgrading my DMD to v2.062 (from v2.059) -
>> running on Win XP.
>>
>> I've had no issues recompiling the (quite old) DFL library I use with
>> the latest DMD, so went on to rebuild a tool I previously developed
>> (that uses DFL). Everything compiled ok, but the linker choked on my RES
>> file. (This project build fine and worked perfectly on previous versions
>> of DMD up to and including v2.059). The error is:
>>
>> OPTLINK (R) for Win32  Release 8.00.12
>> Copyright (C) Digital Mars 1989-2010  All rights reserved.
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/optlink.html
>> atrchecker.RES(3) : Error 52: .DEF Syntax Error
>> DO
>
> I suspect your build script has somehow omitted a ',' from the command line in its invocation of optlink. The usage is
>
> LINK obj[,out[,map[,lib[,def[,res]]]]]
>
> so if a comma misses, your resource file is interpreted as a def file.
>
> If you are invoking the linker through dmd, you might want to check the linker call by adding "-v" to the command line.

Hi Rainer,

I am actually using Visual-D (v0.3.35), so I've tested your idea by copying + pasting from .\Debug\<ProjectName>.buildlog.html into a batch file - and then building using this batch file rather than Visual-D.

And your hunch was spot on! If I modify the the linker invocation with an extra comma (i.e. as in ... "C:\dmd2\windows\lib\",,atrchecker.RES/NOMAP/CO/NOI /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS ..) it builds fine; without the extra comma it fails with the same error as before.

I suppose this is then a Visual-D issue and not a DMD linker issue, right?

Regards,
Ettienne

On 4/22/13, Ettienne <ettienne.gilbert@gmail.com> wrote:
> it turned out that the problem was as Rainer Schuetze suspected.

I should have known from the error message. Anyway there might be more useful stuff about resources here:

http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?D__Tutorial/WindowsResources

On 22.04.2013 22:05, Ettienne wrote:
> I suppose this is then a Visual-D issue and not a DMD linker issue, right?

Yes, it should be fixed in the rc for the next version: http://www.dsource.org/projects/visuald/browser/downloads/VisualD-v0.3.36rc5.exe

On Monday, 22 April 2013 at 22:19:39 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>
> Yes, it should be fixed in the rc for the next version: http://www.dsource.org/projects/visuald/browser/downloads/VisualD-v0.3.36rc5.exe

Hi Rainer,

With VisualD-v0.3.36rc5 (Win XP 32bit, VS 2008) I get an install error:

"Error loading C:\Program Files\VisualD\visuald.dll. Invalid access to memory location"

I tried also with VisualD-v0.3.36rc4 - but get the same error.

If I re-install VisualD-v0.3.35 it installs fine.

Regards,
Ettienne

On 23.04.2013 09:48, Ettienne wrote:
> On Monday, 22 April 2013 at 22:19:39 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>>
>> Yes, it should be fixed in the rc for the next version:
>> http://www.dsource.org/projects/visuald/browser/downloads/VisualD-v0.3.36rc5.exe
>>
>
> Hi Rainer,
>
> With VisualD-v0.3.36rc5 (Win XP 32bit, VS 2008) I get an install error:
>
> "Error loading C:\Program Files\VisualD\visuald.dll. Invalid access to
> memory location"
>
> I tried also with VisualD-v0.3.36rc4 - but get the same error.
>
> If I re-install VisualD-v0.3.35 it installs fine.

XP support for DLLs seems to have been broken between rc3 and rc4 ;-( I'll have to investigate... The fix for the command line is in rc1.

On Wednesday, 24 April 2013 at 06:33:22 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>
> XP support for DLLs seems to have been broken between rc3 and rc4 ;-( I'll have to investigate... The fix for the command line is in rc1.

Hi Rainer,

OK, that's no problem - I'll just stick to rc3 for now then. Thanks for analyzing the problem.

Cheers,
Ettienne