Why can't elves cough?

[James Van Artsdalen]

In <6405 at unix386.Convergent.COM>, mburg at unix386.Convergent.COM (Mike Burg)
	wrote:

| - Use gcc. Can it possibly be built to use the R4 libraries, while
|   having a run-time switch to produce either coff or elf?

gcc produces assembler source.  The format of the executable depends
on that format the linker produces, not the assembly source.  So if
you use the SysVr4 linker, you get ELF output.

> I've tried using GCC-1.37.1 (no Gnu ld or GAS) on SVR4. It's fine to
> compile most things, but however it will gack on the #if machine(i386)
> directives commonly found in /usr/include/sys files. Anyone else have
> any luck? 1.38, 1.39?

gcc 1.39 has a target "i386v4".  It also has a special version of of
fixincludes called "fixincludes-V4" that gets rid of the #machine
nonsense.

> The two big advantages with ELF is dynamic libraries (space saving)

I still don't like the dynamic libraries.  It makes executables slower
to start (exec(2) time), and more importantly, the code in a shared
dynamic library is worse/slower than code in a non-shared library.  In
SysVr3 you had to make changes to the source to make a shared library,
but at least there wasn't as big a performance penalty.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james at bigtex.cactus.org   "Live Free or Die"
Dell Computer Co    9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759         512-338-8789