Request: make coff2omf free

[John Reimer]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:33:11 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:

> John Reimer wrote:
>> I don't understand what you mean about supporting elf?  Supporting
>> elf is only applicable to linux and other OSes (or so I thought).
> 
> Right, but dmd does work on linux, and so must support Elf.
> 


Sure, Elf certainly needs to be supported in that context.


>> We're
>> talking about dmd on win32 here. There is no elf format for win32, or have
>> I misunderstood the whole situation? Can a elf format be made to work on
>> win32?
> 
> Yes. Elf (for object files, anyway) is not operating system dependent.
> 


I can see that this is true in theory only.  I don't recall
seeing any practical examples of it.


>> Even if it could, of what benefit is that for linking with the
>> current set of coff libraries available (mingw)? (sure, I'd love to see
>> elf at work on win32, but I doubt it will help much with the current
>> situation unless elf was use everywhere).
>> 
>> I believe Mingw uses a coff format. Interaction with that opens up a huge
>> expanse of available mingw libraries for linking with dmd/dmc.  Supporting
>> elf on win32 would do nothing for it here.
>> 
>> Maybe, I'm just misunderstanding you?
> 
> Why does Mingw do coff on Win32, while the gcc tools everywhere else do 
> elf? This makes no sense to me.


GCC tools everywhere else are on OSes that have linkers and dynamic
linkers that are tuned for elf predominantly, I guess.  Windows doesn't
have a clue about it. :)

Honestly, I don't know for sure (and I'd love it if there were a way to
make elf work on windows). Given that the mingw naming convention for
symbols is different from VS coff, it doesn't appear that compatibility
with MS libs was a motivating factor for coff support. 

Does the Windows OS care about object format once a binary is linked into
an executable (ie, the OS exec loader)? Is there an instance where object
format might be of interest to the OS? On linux, I assume this is
certainly the case (dynamic linker). I don't know how it works on windows.
This goes beyond my level of knowledge.

-JJR