From: Andrew Crabtree <andrewc AT typhoon DOT rose DOT hp DOT com>
Message-Id: <199805221708.AA239306918@typhoon.rose.hp.com>
Subject: Re: underscores: a.out vs coff vs elf vs gcc vs as vs ld
To: bill AT taniwha DOT tssc DOT co DOT nz (Bill Currie)
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 10:08:37 PDT
Cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <35653DED.28DBED77@taniwha.tssc.co.nz>; from "Bill Currie" at May 22, 98 8:57 pm
Reply-To: andrewc AT rosemail DOT rose DOT hp DOT com
Precedence: bulk

> A little pain now saving a lot later?
I'm still not sure what all the benefits to switching to elf are.  
I only know about the following 

1) Its more advanced in terms of sections it explicitly knows about. 
In turn, better constructor, better template, ...

2) More support from the rest of the fsf community.  Currently the 
object file of choice.  Especially in the linux/sparc world.


3) Possible better support for shared libraries.

The only one I see as real important for me is #3.  I am constantly running
out of disk space.  If we could keep libc out of every executable 
it would be a big boon to me.  A system where people who were 
using djgpp to develop and all had shared libraries installed, but when
they wanted to distribute a game could link in static libraries would
be worth going to.  Otherwise I just don't see justification for the 
effort.


> 'i860-stratus-sysv4' (big endian i860, that was
> fun:/ ))
Yuck.  We just (last fall) converted our entire firmware from big 960 to 
little endian 960 and are still running into problems where we 
need to add a htonl function call.

> As to debuging support (symbols, not loading), is using libgdb a good or
> a bad idea?  Seems to me it would be good from an implementation POV,
> but what about licencing?
??  I don't think I know enough about this to comment.  Isn't it usually
just elf/stabs or elf/dwarf?

> Hmm, back to the underscores issure...if we go to elf and drop the
> things, will that cause some of these gcc-as cross configuration
> problems to go away?
I don't see the underscore issue as making any difference in cross
configuration issues.  If you have any specifics I could give you a better
answer.

Andy