Am 20.03.2016 um 13:23 schrieb Vincent Rivière:
IMHO, there is (only) one important reason for ELF (at least with gcc): new development won't support a.out anymore.The first question is: Why ELF?
There is already one interesting feature in newer gcc's that will probably never make it into a.out: link time optimization (LTO). This feature allows optimizations across translation units and would be very beneficial (in my opinion) for our platform (both execution speed- and code size-wise).
To my understanding, it will not work with a.out since it needs ELF format to transport necessary information to link time.