While comparing the behavior of various versions of old Microsoft C compilers, I tried building a trivial hello-world type program with CL.EXE from Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 (March 1992) running on top of a 32-bit Windows Server 2003. This seemingly trivial task failed:
Command line error D2018 : cannot create linker response file
A quick search revealed that rather predictably, I wasn’t the first person hitting this problem. And as usual, there were only questions, not answers.
MS C/C++ 7.0 was Microsoft’s first compiler with C++ support included, but that’s not what made it special. It was Microsoft’s first DOS/Windows 3.x compiler which required a 386 host and used a 32-bit DOS extender.
Looking at the C/C++ 7.0 executables a bit closer, it’s apparent that these are in fact 32-bit PE modules, with a DOS extender in their respective DOS stub. The catch is that due to their age (released more than a year before NT 3.1), the PE modules are different enough that no NT release can use them. Hence the compiler must be run through NTVDM as if it were a normal DOS executable.
Now, given that when NT 3.1 was released (1993), Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 was still a current product, one would expect that the compiler would run under NT 3.1… and indeed it did! MS C/C++ 7.0 also works under NT 3.50 (1994), but it no longer functions under NT 3.51 (1995). The compiler fails with the above D2018 error message in NT 3.51 and all subsequent releases. At that point, Visual C++ 1.0/1.5 had taken over and C/C++ 7.0 was more or less obsolete, so perhaps the problem slipped under the radar, but why did the compiler stop working at all? What changed? Continue reading →
