Re: [Tinycc-devel] a.out support (was Re: add an executable format?)

[tccm]

Hello Brian,

On Sat, Feb 04, 2023 at 02:28:32PM +0000, Brian Callahan wrote:
> One thing I noticed in your elf2aout.c comments is that Minix-2 only
> supports 14-character file names. You can make the temp file much
> shorter if needed (e.g., hard code it to be something like "temp.aout").

This would introduce possible collisions between simultaneously run
compilations to different files. A cleaner solution would be to use
a randomly generated name but even this can be a can of worms on old
systems.

In practice I would find it sufficient and better for simplicity,
to add a warning in the man page about the possible naming issues.

Best of all would be of course to support aout internally and write the
resulting file directly. Then tcc could be also built smaller for aout
platforms, by dropping elf and dynamic linking. Achieving this would be
probably not easy, given that tcc was made for elf from the beginning
(? what do tcc gurus say?).

> Would it be possible for you to share binaries of your new TCC? I
> finally got Minix-2 i386 running on VirtualBox and it would be nice to
> try out TCC there.

Hopefully tomorrow. Let me get back to you then.

Cheers
/tccm