Re: Benefits of latest gas?

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at wasabisystems dot com>]

Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com> writes:

> >But all in all I think you would be better off using that checkbook to
> >pay your kernel hackers to add ELF support.  That would get you the
> >current gas for free, and I think it would simplify your life quite a
> >bit over the long run.
> >
> It's been suggested a few times. :-) Mach-O has had a lot of special
> features added over the years - unusual kinds of directives and relocs,
> multi-architecture files, etc, all of which OS X development depends
> on. Getting the equivalent functionality into ELF would not be
> impossible, but certainly quite expensive. The kernel work is very
> nearly the easiest part of the project.

I'm no expert on Mach-O, but most of the features I've heard about
already exist in ELF, albeit in different form.

ELF doesn't have multi-arch files, but they would be easy to
implement.  One simple approach would be to add a few dynamic tags to
specify an architecture and a range of program segments.  If the
runtime linker say such a tag, it would only use the specified program
segments on the specified architecture.

I know this is just pie in the sky.  I don't expect Apple to ever
switch.  But I think we would all benefit if they did.

Ian