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Re: GCC 4.3 target deprecation proposals
On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Paul Koning wrote:
> >>>>> "Joseph" == Joseph S Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> writes:
>
> Joseph> ... There is good coverage for
> Joseph> bare-metal ELF targets, but none for bare-metal a.out and
> Joseph> COFF targets (perhaps we should consider deprecating all of
> Joseph> those, on the presumption that bare-metal use has moved to
> Joseph> ELF and objcopy is likely to be used in any case to produce a
> Joseph> raw binary image...
>
> I believe pdp11 (all OS flavors) is a.out. Is getting rid of COFF and
> a.out considered a desirable thing to do? If so I'll look at what
> that implies in pdp11.
Getting rid of generic *-*-aout* and *-*-coff*, where there are
corresponding ELF targets for the same CPU, is what I was suggesting might
be considered (and has not attracted any comments on the general idea).
This is not the same as getting rid of COFF and a.out altogether, because
of various other targets using those formats.
It is of course the case that various features in GCC work better with ELF
and DWARF than other formats (and LTO is being written to use libelf at
present, for example, although I imagine it may be extended to support
other file formats with the same raw data embedded in them in due course).
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com