From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: dj@stealth.ctron.com (DJ Delorie)
To: artk@congruent.com
Cc: erich@uruk.org, gas2@cygnus.com, bfd@cygnus.com
Subject: Re: traditional Intel & Microsoft formats...
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 1994 09:56:00 -0000
Message-id: <9411091756.AA21070@delorie>
References: <9411091639.AA07216@Congruent.COM>
X-SW-Source: 1994/msg00158.html

>   ar only makes sense if you have ld.  For ld to work with Windows NT
> and Windows95 require more changes then you can imagine.  Its at
> least several man years of work.  There's the further problem that
> much of it must be done by reverse engineering microsoft executables.

NT libraries are the same format as unix libraries.  In fact, GNU make
built on NT already knows about library timestamps!  NT objects appear
to be straight COFF objects, perhaps with different reloc types or
something, but objdump seems to like them.

The NT "pe" executable format is coff-ish, but it's NOT coff.  At
least, not enough to use our standard tools on it.  I've been reverse
engineering it and working on determining the feasability of writing
an NT linker.

As for ld, it's probably almost easier to do this from scratch, as the
NT linker needs to know a LOT about dll's and resources.  I'm guessing
that an NT-specific linker is 2/3 this stuff and 1/3 actual linking.
It would be more work merging gld's stuff to the NT extensions than
just writing an NT-specific linker from scratch, although you'd still
want to use BFD to load objects.