Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 09:36:51 +0200
From: erherman AT si DOT bosch DOT de (Erich Hermann)
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Object file formats, linking

Hi,

this is Erich from a little village close to Stuttgart, Germany. I'm
working on a project called 'dynamic linker' for my dissertation. This
dynamic linker will be a part of a software application in future that
provides graphical programming.

Graphical programming consists of breaking the problem into small subproblems
and drawing block diagrams for these subproblems. These block diagrams
are converted to C-code and then compiled and linked to an executable
program.

While programming you change many little things in your block diagrams.
Every time you want to see if your changes work fine, the C-code of the 
modified block diagram will be generated, compiled and the whole project
will be linked and loaded into memory again.

To increase performance the idea of a dynamic linker was born. Only the
modified object modules are to be loaded into memory including all the
fixupps a linker has to resolve.

So here are my questions. Where from can I get documentation about object
file formats (COFF, ELF, a.out, ECOFF, OMF, ...)? Where is the GDB internal
object file format documented? How does linking and loading of programs
into memory work? Can you recommend any special books, articles, ...?

Hope you can help. 

Many greetings,

    Erich