Re: Cygwin support

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Brian Dessent wrote:
> Paul Brook wrote:
> 
>> If you really want to solve this then you could always stop using PE/COFF.
>> The ARM EABI (and in particular the arm-none-symbianelf target) demonstrates
>> how this can be done. Basically the toolchain generates ELF objects,
>> executables and DSOs, then you feed them through a postlinker to generate
>> target (PE/COFF) images.
> 
> Using ELF as an intermediary format doesn't really change the situation
> facing the design of plugins in any meaningful way though.  If the end
> result is still PE/COFF executables and DLLs then the same problems and
> restrictions still exist that would make the current proposed design
> unworkable on these Windows targets.  If you recall the issue is that
> plugins want unfettered access to the full symbol table of the
> executable.  Doing this with PE/COFF is possible, but it binds the
> plugin DLL to the specific name of the executable that it was linked
> against, such that the same plugin wouldn't be loadable from cc1.exe,
> cc1plus.exe, f951.exe, etc.  To get around this you'd have to either
> link a separate copy of the plugin for each executable,

So do that, then.  Where's the problem?

Andrew.