Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1998/09/23/20:14:49
Since I brought up a well-worn topic, I thought I'd at least throw out
an idea I found no discussion of in the archives:
Mumit Khan let me know that mingw32 uses Win32's PE-COFF
and not ELF as I had said before. Since PE-COFF is an extension
of COFF, would it possibly be more feasible to switch to that
format if a switch is contemplated again? I found lots of
discussion of switching to ELF but none about PE-COFF.
Some possible advantages:
1) After updating the headers to add the additional fields used by
PE-COFF, you may only need to tweak the appropriate code and
not have to wholesale rewrite it. Of course binutils and everything
else would have to reconfigured to generate PE-COFF instead of
COFF.
2) Would allow for the adding of the occasionally requested .DLL
support.
3) Would allow for an easier package for writing Win32 programs
with DJGPP (another frequent request) since DJGPP and Win32
would share the same file format.
4) From what Mumit Khan told me, PE-COFF is just as good with
template instantiation as ELF.
If ever it's decided to switch to a new format, please consider this
possibility.
Mark
--
Mark E. snowball3 AT usa DOT net
http://members.xoom.com/snowball3/
- Raw text -