Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1998/09/23/20:20:33
> 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.
Hmmm, no work for no gain. No, not a bargain. The advantages of ELF
are weak symbols and better debugging, neither of which PE-COFF has.
> 2) Would allow for the adding of the occasionally requested .DLL
> support.
No, it wouldn't. You'd need to add DLL support in MS-DOS first.
> 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.
No, there's a lot more than that involved. The main advantage of
DJGPP is the runtime (libc), which you can't use at all when you build
a Windows program. If this is what you want, use mingw or cygwin.
> 4) From what Mumit Khan told me, PE-COFF is just as good with
> template instantiation as ELF.
Which means that DJGPP's COFF will do just as well, since PE-COFF is
just regular COFF with well-understood extra sections for DLLs, a DOS
stub, and a few bugs.
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