ELF support magic worked into RISC OS GCC - RISC OS News, Software and Information

ELF support magic worked into RISC OS GCC

Published: 5th Oct 2003, 19:15:23GMT Source: drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

Page 1 of 1

Dragging RISC OS in line with everything else

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

This article has been linked to, or is available in the following formats:

[Printable] [Digg this] [Blog search]

philpem (+0.1) 5/10/03 7:56PM	Hurrah - another improvement to the best (only?) free RISC OS development suite. Keep it up guys!
philpem (-0.9) 5/10/03 7:59PM	OK, just to clarify, by "guys" I meant "Chocky (Peter Naulls) and the rest of the GCCSDK developers".
jonix (+1.1) 6/10/03 5:33PM	It's great to see work being done on development tools that should ultimately make it easier and quicker for programmers to write and/or port software.
druck (-1.0) 6/10/03 8:03PM	Damn, more work add ELF recognition to ARMalyser! ---druck http://www.armclub.org.uk/
mrchocky (-0.9) 6/10/03 8:47PM	You might like to look at the bfd library used by ld and others (although it is GPL) - and add AOF support while you're there -- Peter, drobe.co.uk
druck (-0.9) 6/10/03 9:38PM	It already does AOF's, even ones typed as text. ---druck http://www.armclub.org.uk/
mrchocky (-0.9) 6/10/03 9:59PM	bfd doesn't. -- Peter, drobe.co.uk
1 comment(s) are below your moderation threshold. Login to view them.