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FASM can't brew (!) OMF ".OBJ" files OBJCONV port it away (Announce)

posted by Japheth Homepage, Germany (South), 02.01.2009, 11:14

> > Linker can be useful/necessary if no HLLs are involved at all.
>
> Closed source pre-brewed LIB then.
No. Just have a look at the RxDOS project for example, which consists of some dozens of assembly modules.

> > They are even useful if there's just a single module to be linked to a
> binary.
>
> Please explain how. How half-done work (OBJ) can be better then fully done
> (EXE ready to run/crash) ?
A common task for DOS linkers was to support overlays, which allowed to create binaries larger than 640 kB.

Another thing are "floating-point fixups", which were used in some 16-bit OSes to load an emulator if no FPU was present.

A linker will also allow to (re)organize and/or sort segments. This might be useful in some cases. Also, IIRC FASM doesn't allow to temporarily switch segments in "MZ-EXE mode". So code similar to this one:

mov ax,TEXT("string 1")
mov bx,TEXT("string 2")

where the macro TEXT will ensure that the strings are written into their very own segment, cannot be done equally easily in FASM in "MZ-EXE" mode.

> > Asm is less portable. An assembler is among those kind of tools where
> the
> > higher degree of portability of C is a REAL advantage.
>
> I see no point in porting JAWASM or FASM to some 64-bit only BIG
> endian CPU ... but feel free to do :-D

It's not necessarily 64bit cpus or non-x86 cpus. JWasm got a Linux binary at virtually no cost, and this might also be true for OS/2 (and to a lesser degree the Mac).

> This assumes that you have many very mature C compilers available
> ... and even then, FASM's selfcompiling work is easy to check and debug.
Quality of OW suffered several times from bugs in the tools which were used to create the final release. So it is an additional risk.

---
MS-DOS forever!

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