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From: Rugxulo <rugxulo AT gmail DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Abort when compiling using COFF debug format (-gcoff)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:36:37 -0800 (PST)
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Hi,

On Jan 27, 12:48 am, Eli Zaretskii <e DOT  DOT  DOT  AT gnu DOT org> wrote:
> > From: Rugxulo <rugx DOT  DOT  DOT  AT gmail DOT com>
> > Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:01:08 -0800 (PST)
>
> > > Sounds like the COFF debug info generation has bit-rotted in GCC.
> > > Nothing new here, no other platform uses COFF AFAIK.
>
> > What about ECOFF and XCOFF? (Tru64 ?? AIX ??) And I'd assume PE/COFF
> > still uses most of the same COFF sources too. (Or did you only meant
> > COFF debug info?
>
> Yes, I only meant COFF debug info, and I even wrote that explicitly
> (see above).

Well, I was confused by your "no other platform uses COFF AFAIK"
statement.

> > Dunno, it has vaguely worse support for C++ by default, so perhaps
> > that's why.) But yeah, GCC and BinUtils seem to focus mostly on ELF
> > these days (see Gold linker).
>
> Again, this is not about the object format, this is about debug info
> format.  AFAIK, MinGW uses PE/COFF for the object format, but defaults
> to DWARF for debug format.

You mean DWARF-2 plus extensions, right?

Well, admittedly ELF is more popular by far, esp. for *nix, and you
can't use COFF debug info on ELF (can you?), hence the rarer the COFF
format, the moreso its (optional) debug info.

I honestly don't know who uses COFF debug info. I don't know if Cygwin
or MinGW support it, even optionally. Presumably they generate the
same as MS (CodeView??) in order to be compatible, but maybe not if
GDB is considered sufficient.

Honestly, Eli, I thought GNU Emacs (at least DJGPP) used "-gcoff".
(Was that for unexec support?) Has that changed?