From: iverson AT cisco DOT com (Tim Iverson) Subject: Re: Nobody in the world understands Gnu's 'ld'. 25 Mar 1997 19:18:57 -0800 Sender: daemon AT cygnus DOT com Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199703252323.PAA02841.cygnus.gnu-win32@rottweiler.cisco.com> Original-To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com In-Reply-To: from "root" at Mar 25, 97 08:23:33 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Actually, quite a few people understand GNU's ld very well indeed (I do, for one, and I suspect the folks at Cygnus understand it much better). And yes, I not only use the scripting language, I rely on it quite heavily. It is indispensable when preparing images for an embedded system. I've also linked disparate object formats with GNU-ld, and for the formats it supports, it usually works quite well. Of course, I usually also manually inspect the output for the first couple of images ... ;-) The only problem I've come across with the NT/95 b17.1 GNU ld was the screwed up offsets when linking OMF and GNU-pe-i386 objects with a commercial linker. I had assumed this was a Phar-Lap problem or just an incompatible image problem -- I'm a little out of date wrt. MS; didn't know MS' "PE" really was COFF+MS (thanks for info win32-folks ;-). There are other reports of the same problem with the MSVC linker, though. So, I now suspect a minor bug in the GNU implementation of pe-i386. BTW, before you start throwing around all these assumptions about what 'we' need in a linker, consider that I would indeed prefer support for a.out, ELF, and other Unix object formats over support for linking MSVC objects or libraries. That would be a feature I would use. Linking with MSVC objects would be a feature I would not use. GNU-ld is one of the major attractions to using the GNU toolset. The implementation has it's drawbacks, but overall it is a rather large step forward in the linking game. The whole GNU concept is driven by people who need a feature bad enough to actually implement it, and generous enough to share the results of their efforts. Whine all you want, but be aware that mostly it just irritates the folks that spend time writing useful code. I may take a stab at fixing the offset problem. But since this feature would only be used for a limited time here, I won't waste more than a few hours on it. If you really need this feature, don't hold your breath for a patch from me. Damn, anyone got a pair of pliers? I seem to have this trolling hook stuck in my mouth ... ;-> - Tim Iverson iverson AT cisco DOT com +---------------- | From: root AT jacob DOT remcomp DOT fr (root) | Subject: Nobody in the world understands Gnu's 'ld'. | To: jqb AT netcom DOT com (Jim Balter) | Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 08:23:33 +0100 (MET) | Cc: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com | | Gnu's linker: A NIGHTMARE! | ------------------------- | [very long anti-GNU-ld diatribe, heavily paraphrased: I can't comprehend GNU ld, therefore I gave up and wrote my own linker. No one ever uses half the features of GNU ld anyway. All we really need is MSVC object and library support.] - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".