The GCC project for RISC OS has embarked on a crusade to bring the ELF binary format to our platform. It all began when Peter Naulls first looked into integrating ELF support into the GCCSDK and John Bell released his ELF binary loader. As of this weekend, we're told that an ELF output capable GCC for RISC OS is available from Peter's riscos.info site.
The ELF format is used by Linux and there are therefore a great number of utilities and tools available for the executable format which can now be used by RISC OS programmers to aid development of applications. Hopefully, software development will be a little less painful and users will enjoy software of higher quality. ELF does have its downsides, such as increased executable file size with statically linked executables.
RISC OS software built in ELF format could be used with binutils and the infamous gdb. ELF also opens the possibility for shared libraries.
The normal 32bit GCC (from the same place as the ELF supporting one) has also been updated to take changes to UnixLib into account. See below for more technical details on ELF and we can assure you that there's no cheesey dwarven or fairy references either.
Links
ELF capable GCC for RISC OS Peter Naulls is a drobe.co.uk editor
Introduction to ELF
Overview of ELF format
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