Re: traditional Intel & Microsoft formats...

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@cygnus.com>]

   Date: Wed, 9 Nov 94 11:39:23 est
   From: artk@congruent.com (Arthur Kreitman)

   >   From: Erich Stefan Boleyn <erich@uruk.org>
   >
   >   Greetings.
   >
   >   I'm curious if there is an intention of any on these lists to
   >   try to be able to (for the i386 processor series):
   >
   >     1) assemble (GAS) and manipulate (BFD) traditional Intel/Microsoft
   >	16-bit code (OMF/NE formats).
   >
   >     2) assemble (GAS) and manipulate (BFD) traditional Intel/Microsoft
   >	32-bit code (OMF/PE formats).

How much would supporting those Microsoft formats buy us over what DJ
Delorie has already done with DJGPP and GO32?  (Please excuse my
cluelessness, I've never done development on DOS or Windows and know next
to nothing about their file formats &c.)

      As far as gas is concerned, only minor changes are required to 
   support microsoft's coff interperation (we've done it, and will
   be integrating the changes into the latest gas release, and contributing
   back the changes to the fsf).  

Cool.  I look forward to merging it in...

     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.

Hm.  I could believe it might be significantly different from the formats
we use on other systems, but man-years of work?  Is it *that* different?

The primary goal would be to produce working executables.  Using object
and library formats compatible with the native tools would be a plus, but
not absolutely necessary, especially if the vendor is anal about releasing
information.

And given that this vendor is Microsoft, I think we should be especially
paranoid about not violating license terms &c, when trying to do any of
that reverse engineering...  We don't want to make Cygnus or the FSF an
easy lawsuit target.

      If gnu cared about market impact, Windows95 support would take the
   highest priority.  I don't think that the gnu community realizes the 
   potential (and the impact) of every pc being a workstation class device
   with a sophisticated, multitasking, multithreaded operating system. 
   Remember, the windows install base is 70,000,000.

I agree it's a huge market.  But I'm always skeptical about any numbers
quoted.  My laptop is probably counted as one of those 70M systems,
because it was shipped to me with Windows, but that doesn't mean I
reinstalled it after repartitioning the disk...

So call it an install base of 69,999,999; it's still big. :-)