From: Psilon AT concentric DOT net (Avery Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.os.msdos.djgpp,rec.games.programmer
Subject: Re: The numer 1 compiler, DJGPP or MSVC  Here's a good rating comparision
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 18:49:03 GMT
Organization: Concentric Internet Services
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qed AT chromatic DOT com (Paul Hsieh) wrote:

>On 17 Sep 97 07:22:41 GMT, Herman Schoenfeld said:
>> >: ... There are no MSVC compilers for them so any comment comparing 
>> >: GCC to MSVC is pretty much a waste of bandwidth. 
>> >
>> >Wrong. Some of us can read assembly language files generated by 
>> >compilers. Some of us can link modules from "foreign" compilers that 
>> >don't natively target a particular environment.
>> 
>> No, it's not "wrong". MSVC doesn't support linux. Why must you fill this 
>> newgroup with your lies?
>
>My understanding is that MSVC's object format is a well documented, 
>publically known format called "COM" which is not specifically tied to 
>the Windows operating system.  What this means is that you can take code 
>compiled from C/C++ into .OBJ files, and if you've crafted your own 
>linker, you can splice them together for whatever OS you want on the x86 
>so long as it supports 32 bit FLAT mode programming.

COFF.

My experience is that you can't really combine .OBJ files from different
compilers because the compiler will generate calls to runtime library
routines that require initialization during run-time startup.  One of the
most horrendous is floating-point divide code generated by MSVC++ 4.0, in
which it checks a flag called __adjust_fdiv and calls a
Pentium-FDIV-bug-bypassing divide routine if it's set.


-- Avery Lee (Psilon AT concentric DOT net)
Try my freeware junk at http://www.concentric.net/~Psilon
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