Re: [MiNT] C++ Stuff

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

Miro Kropacek wrote:
> I meant the opposite -- how it's possible even the ancient AtariST 
> compilers (PureC, LatticeC, ... -- all used DRI/GST format I believe) 
> discard unused stuff because it seems only natural thing to do

Pure C and co were commercial products, the GST (or whatever else) 
object file format may have included such a feature since the beginning. 
That was good software !

> and gcc/ld (from the beginning?) didn't care about it?
> It seemed strange to nobody?

I don't know the full history, but on older unixes, gcc had to be 
compatible with the native linker, then gnu ld had to be binary 
compatible with the native linker too to avoid incompatibilities, etc. 
So about function removing, if that feature was unavailable with 
original tools, it might explain why it was not present in gcc in early 
stages.

Another reason is that all unixes used shared libraries, so the libc was 
never embedded into executables, and it was loaded only one time in 
system memory. With this feature, the size of the executables is always 
minimal.

> Or there was another (with the ability to discard unused stuff)
> object format mint community didn't choose to use?

Yes, there is another format: COFF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COFF
But I'm not 100% sure it allows discarding unused code.

Regarding file formats, unixes have used a.out, then COFF, then ELF.
So our MiNT stuff is totally outdated.
Switching to ELF *object* file format is the first step to do toward the 
modernity.
Implementing Virtual Memory inside the FreeMiNT kernel would be another 
great step.
As far as I know, these two steps are totally unrelated (but mandatory 
for the next steps).

--
Vincent Rivière