Mail Archives: djgpp/1994/12/08/17:16:12
Mat Hostetter (mat AT ardi DOT com ) writes:
> First, some background: at ARDI we build the DOS version of our
> product (Executor) under linux, using cross-compilation tools and the
> djgpp libraries and headers. This was easy to set up and works
> extremely well.
Yes we do the same, under BSD/386 rather than Linux. In fact any Unix
system that can run gcc can (fairly) easily be configured to build a
cross-compiler using --target=i386-go32. Linux is a red herring:
there all sorts of different Unix systems (e.g. FreeBSD) with
different native object code formats, why should we choose to be
"compatible" with Linux only?
> Charles's second point is a good one. The ability to use V2 to build
> Windows apps would be _enormously_ useful to us, and I suspect to many
> other people as well. This would fundamentally improve the power of
> djgpp, and switching to ELF would not.
And when Windoze95/Chicago eventually arrives, how much longer will
vanilla MSDOS survive: Chicago runs 32-bit NT/COFF executables too.
Although I think that ELF is a much more elegant format (we use it
ourselves for our tools), it looks like compilers whose primary
emphasis is DOS (and therefore soon Chicago) should standardise on
NT-compatible COFF. It is a golden opportunity that Microsoft picked
an object code format which is easily supported by the GNU tools.
Products like Toolbuster use GCC to provide a Unix compiler and
run-time environment for NT/Chicago, but you have to pay for them. It
would be great if DJGPP could form the basis of a free alternative.
--
_________________________________________________________________________
Nigel Stephens, Algorithmics Ltd, 3 Drayton Park, London, N5 1NU, England
phone: +44 171 700 3301 fax: +44 171 700 3400 email: nigel AT algor DOT co DOT uk
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