Request: make coff2omf free

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Walter Bright wrote:

> John Reimer wrote:
>> On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:33:11 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
>> 
>>> Why does Mingw do coff on Win32, while the gcc tools everywhere else do
>>> elf? This makes no sense to me.
>> 
>> 
>> It seems that elf is an object /and/ executable format, so it requires
>> support from the OS somehow.
> 
> If you don't want to take my word for it, ok, but object files output
> from C, C++, and D compilers are not executable - not on Windows or Linux.

Actually it is possible to dynamically link static ELF object files,
although it is highly impractical and very slow. As I'm sure you know, on
all OS'es using ELF, ELF is used for all stages, static object files,
relocatable object files, shared object files (.so and thus a shared
library) and executables. The difference is in which sections are present
and in some cases, what content they have.

I think it is a good idea to have the same (and actually fairly short) spec
for all these formats, it makes it easier to understand a larger portion of
this part of the system in depth. I also believe the executables and shared
objects are considered to be very efficient, and so it is likely that there
has been a compromise on behalf of static object files, making them
somewhat more complex.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
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