traditional Intel & Microsoft formats...

[artk@congruent.com (Arthur Kreitman)]

>   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.)

  This would be for native support.  Remember, what go32 does is provide
a 32 bit environment.

>   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?
  Its different enough to require two or three people working for six or
nine months.  That's just the binutils side.  That doesn't include MS's
special debugging formats, or the gcc changes needed to really fit in
to MS's world, or doing gdb.

>   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.

  You need to link against microsoft libraries to be able to create an
executable that runs.

>   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.

 Reverse engineering isn't a problem.  Even Microsoft know's that its
not enforcable.  However, it is a ton of work.  I've been trying to
get unencumbered specs (not marked Microsoft Confidential).


>   I agree it's a huge market.  But I'm always skeptical about any numbers
  Prime didn't believe the impact of workstations.