DOS ain't dead

OMF records (Developers)

posted by marcov, 19.02.2012, 16:43

> > Apparently nobody was ever interested in a truly free 16-bit linker.
> Since
> > then they would have written one.
>
> BCC/Dev86's LD86 (a.out variant) doesn't count? But I digress ... nobody in
> "modern" Linux, *BSD, or Windows cares about 16-bit, so they don't use it.

Nobody outside those cares too, or there would be a well maintained 16-bit open source stack.

It is not "them" that are failing, it is you, the users of such things.

> The 32-bit extensions (from MS,
> Borland, others??) to OMF came much later than the original format and seem
> to be less widely supported in some cases.

OMF is afaik quite adhoc and poorly standarized, one of the reasons the unix formats (coff, elf) won out. a.out is also very simplistic, and can be seen as an unix counterpart of omf.

> similar to older Borland Win32 stuff.

I'm not sure what modern Embarcadero/Borland stuff uses. I haven't investigated, but their debug info is still called "Topview" which is afaik the (originally intel) debugging format for OMF.

> But
> obviously MS uses PE/COFF, DJGPP uses "plain" COFF, AIX uses XCOFF, Ultrix
> and Tru64 (and VMS?) used ECOFF, Mac OS X uses Mach-O, *BSD used to use
> a.outb, etc. etc. etc.

a.out/coff/ELF are the successive unix formats. Mach-O comes from Next.

> There are several other Oberon compilers, see my other (Wirth birthday)
> thread, mostly all 32-bit, so I don't "need" Oberon/M, just messing around
> with it because it's tiny and seems to work fairly well for what it does.

That's the problem, and my point exactly. Everybody is only messing around on 16-bit, and trying to apply bandaids and do some smartshopping (often on murky legal grounds) to keep stuff running.

Probably we'll have this same discussion in 2020 again, and then there still won't be an open source 16-bit toolchain.

Complete thread:

• OMF records - Rugxulo, 15.02.2012, 16:14 (Developers)
  • Just some research about the name "E. R. Videki" - rr, 15.02.2012, 21:09
    • Just some research about the name "E. R. Videki" - Arjay, 15.02.2012, 22:08
      • Just some research about the name "E. R. Videki" - Rugxulo, 15.02.2012, 23:19
        • Just some research about the name "E. R. Videki" - Arjay, 16.02.2012, 00:47
  • OMF records - Arjay, 15.02.2012, 22:36
    • OMF records - Rugxulo, 15.02.2012, 23:29
      • OMF records - Arjay, 16.02.2012, 01:09
        • OMF records - Rugxulo, 16.02.2012, 08:00
          • OMF records - rr, 16.02.2012, 09:51
            • OMF records - Arjay, 16.02.2012, 21:37
          • OMF records - marcov, 18.02.2012, 17:16
            • OMF records - Rugxulo, 18.02.2012, 17:32
              • OMF records - Rugxulo, 18.02.2012, 17:54
                • OMF records - marcov, 19.02.2012, 16:47
                  • OMF records - RayeR, 19.02.2012, 17:19
                    • OMF records - marcov, 20.02.2012, 10:33
                  • OMF records - Rugxulo, 19.02.2012, 21:33
                    • OMF records - marcov, 20.02.2012, 18:23
              • OMF records - marcov, 19.02.2012, 16:43
                • OMF records - Rugxulo, 19.02.2012, 21:15
                  • OMF records - marcov, 20.02.2012, 10:54
                    • OMF records - Rugxulo, 20.02.2012, 17:50
                      • OMF records - marcov, 20.02.2012, 18:54
                        • OMF records - Rugxulo, 20.02.2012, 20:09
  • OMF records - Japheth, 16.02.2012, 18:08
    • OMF records - Rugxulo, 16.02.2012, 19:48
      • OMF records - Arjay, 16.02.2012, 21:27
        • OMF records - Arjay, 16.02.2012, 21:52
          • OMF records - Rugxulo, 16.02.2012, 23:09
    • OMF records - Rugxulo, 17.02.2012, 02:15
      • OMF records - Japheth, 17.02.2012, 08:08
        • OMF records - Rugxulo, 17.02.2012, 20:21
          • OMF records - Japheth, 18.02.2012, 09:05
            • OMF records - Rugxulo, 18.02.2012, 16:39
              • OMF records - Japheth, 18.02.2012, 17:55
                • jwlinkd updated - Japheth, 20.02.2012, 14:31
                  • Oberon subtyping (was: JWlinkD updated) - Rugxulo, 20.02.2012, 20:14
                    • BEFI 3H (Oberon-M fully supported) - Rugxulo, 06.03.2012, 23:30
          • OMF records - processing SYS.OBJ with tdstrip - Arjay, 18.02.2012, 14:22
            • OMF records - processing SYS.OBJ with tdstrip - Arjay, 18.02.2012, 15:47
              • OMF records - processing SYS.OBJ with tdstrip - Rugxulo, 18.02.2012, 17:12
            • OMF records - processing SYS.OBJ with tdstrip - Rugxulo, 18.02.2012, 16:56
              • OMF records - processing SYS.OBJ with tdstrip - Arjay, 19.02.2012, 10:16
                • OMF records - processing SYS.OBJ with tdstrip - Rugxulo, 19.02.2012, 17:58
  • Oberon 1.2 OC (compiler) patch - Arjay, 18.02.2012, 23:37
    • Oberon/M 1.2 (OMF output) ... die, REGINT, die! - Rugxulo, 19.02.2012, 00:54
      • Oberon/M 1.2 (OMF output) ... die, REGINT, die! - Arjay, 19.02.2012, 10:05