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OMF records (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 20.02.2012, 17:50

> Well, no discussion that Pascal/m2 is not bad :-D
>
> M3/Oberon is a bit more difficult. Some people rave about it, but for me it
> went too far. OTOH that is based on very old experiences (before I was OOP
> schooled), so that might be out of whack.
Modula-3 is pretty cool, but it's main advantages (OOP, generics, exceptions, threads, garbage collection) have all been taken over (literally) by Java, Python, C#. Others later gained similar features (Ada95, C++98, Delphi).

Oberon is nice but probably too minimal for most people as it lacks generics, threads, exceptions, and sometimes implementations lack garbage collection too.

In other words, there's a lot of competing languages with similar features, so there is less reason to try alternatives.

> I don't care much about stats like sf.net where a PHP CMS skin counts as
> much as 6million lines FPC/Lazarus project.
I know, 90% of statistics are made up. And I don't count stupid web crapola either, but it's not my chart. It's just a (very) rough guess at what people use. For sure, we know GNU prefers (POSIX) C over pretty much everything else.

> But maybe that is the solution? Start adding relevant OMF support to the
> above watcom linker?
As mentioned, it has support, but obviously there are some hidden quirks that need to be ironed out. WLINK is less of a generic OMF linker and more of a "this is what our compiler uses" thing.

> > It's hardly my fault that OMF has changed over the years or that
> compatible
> > tools vary in quality and licensing.
>
> I react to your repeated statements about the 32/64-bit open source crowd
> not caring. It is not their task. It is the task of the 16-bit users
> themselves, and them alone.

Specifically, I meant several things here:

* Their OSes never supported 16-bit (or at least not recently or directly, e.g. Win64)
* They never used or needed OMF, even the 32-bit extensions
* They don't care about binary compatibility, esp. with other OSes
* They nowadays focus more on C/C++ (POSIX) or C#/Java, etc.

I didn't mean they have to support 16-bit, just that they don't, for various reasons. (Though Windows should have no good excuse, but sigh, lost cause.)

> > [OMF is] standardized, just nobody cares because they "moved on" to newer,
> > shinier things. Doesn't mean either is better or worse,
>
> You should go into politics :-)
Face it, the native preferred format of Win9x/NT was PE/COFF. Presumably some toolsets only used OMF because it was good enough and were able to reuse pre-existing tools. That's normal, nobody rewrites everything from scratch.

> > And for the record, *nix weenies hate a.out and COFF for being old and
> > badly spec'd, but praise the newer ELF as only thing worth supporting.
>
> True. Coff would be dead if it wasn't for Windows supporting derivates. But
> that is a decision taken already in the 1997 timeframe, hardly new.
COFF has a variety of (minor?) problems, hence a few weird extensions to it have been done over the years. DJGPP (and EMX and original Linux) all used a.out originally. Supposedly DJGPP switched to COFF for various reasons (1992?) because it was "best at the time" (pre-existing BinUtils support??). I can only guess WinNT chose it due to Cutler's VMS (ECOFF??) history. Linux switched to ELF for better .so support (among other things, e.g. debugging, better C++ handling, etc).

> > I think even GCC has (mostly) given up on older stuff with only minimal
> > support in BinUtils for "older" formats. This is not (barely) based upon
> > technical merit but more on personal preference or political reasoning.
>
> Personally, I think because of zero activity.
I don't know, you never know with them (weird political decisions), but four of their seven "top tier" platforms for GCC 4.7.0 are Linux (presumably ELF) for various architectures. See here. And they already removed "generic" COFF and such things a while ago.

> The point is that as long as people are willing to work on something it is
> not dead. But that is the problem with Dos. The bulk are users, not makers,
> at least in the programming tools department.
Windows just buys whatever tech they need. *nix just copies Linux (or POSIX standard), no brainer, esp. with commercial support from all the weird hardware makers out there.

> > I'd rather not install Oberon OS just to learn Oberon.
>
> IIRC there was an Oberon environment that ran on top of Dos? Called
> "SYSTEM" or something.
Last updated in 1999 or 2001 or such. You really think it'll work on modern machines? In case you didn't already know, a lot of things break because of bad assumptions (esp. re: memory handling). I could be wrong, but I'm highly skeptical. However, I don't see how patching that is somehow superior to patching this (Oberon-M).

> Doesn't produce Oberon binaries for use outside that environment, but if
> learning is the only reason? SPecially since one of the charms of Oberon
> was the integration with an OOP OS.
The whole point (to me) is to see what I can do portably, and I didn't lose my interest in DOS. So I want something that (also) works here. I don't want "yet another" Linux/Win/Mac only tool.

> Oberon was not just a language afaik. It was a complete environment,
> including an OS that functioned as an OOP store.
Well, obviously if Wirth can target it to ARM, it doesn't need the fancy OS.

> > > Probably we'll have this same discussion in 2020 again, and then there
> > > still won't be an open source 16-bit toolchain.
> >
> > So what? It's not me whining,
>
> Please :-) Everytime you can't find something it is the old
> "Linux/BSD/blabla don't care" Calimero argument. And that is usually my
> trigger :)
They don't care, they openly admit such. It's not just a passive disinterest (although that's mostly true), it's downright refusal to help with anything outside of their narrow view of the software world.

> > I'm at least trying to partially get
> > something to work instead of throwing it away. If you don't like it,
> fine,
> > but I fail to see the virtue in discarding software and decrying
> everything
> > that is legacy-based. It's almost like you expect me to roll my own OS,
>
> No. I'm expecting you to start working on creation of the tools you miss,
> instead of constantly trying to dig into aeons old dirt in the home it
> magically already exist, and if you fail whine that "they just don't
> care".
Oxford Oberon had a native DOS build at one time (as did XDS), but all these years years later, I cannot find it. Granted, it had bugs, but it'd be better than nothing. And he still updates it, but only for Windows, Linux, Mac. He already told me he has zero interest in (re)porting to DOS. So I can't even use what already existed. Worse is that compiling it is almost impossible as it relies on (*nix-heavy) OCaml to bootstrap.

OO2C did supposedly build (privately) for DJGPP at one time, but they never released the binaries. Also, in case it wasn't obvious, I've tried several times to build it, but something always goes wrong. It's clearly only meant for *nix as it makes some horrible assumptions. Probably not totally impossible but very hard to get working.

My point isn't useless whining, it's that things did in fact used to work but don't anymore. It's frustrating. Even object formats change, so I have to either hunt down ancient (mostly proprietary) linkers or somehow patch "newer" (similarly abandoned, apparently) free-r ones.

> In every message of yours, the sentiment that everybody somehow unfairly
> treated Dos oozes out. But if there is something at fault, it is the
> remaining Dos users themselves that are at fault. Not the "others".
Software makers refuse to even waste time on DOS. They won't even test in DOSEMU. Sometimes they won't even accept patches. They literally just don't care. Now admittedly most of them don't directly try to piss me off, but sometimes I just gotta wonder, "WHY???" I mean, so much for portability if you assume POSIX, it really kills everything else. I'm surprised Windows has lasted this long with such horrible POSIX-only software out there. I'm also surprised DJGPP ever worked with anything considering all the horrible ideas that come from *nix.

In fact, I even wonder if DJGPP is to blame. It "eased" the translation of POSIX stuff to DOS (and partially Windows) instead of promoting more portable code. But instead of people caring about this end, they went more in the other direction of "more POSIX, more arcane, even less portable", which is frustrating.

I know, it doesn't matter. I need to do everything myself (eh??). I should make my own compilers, OSes, quit whining, start learning. Well, guess what, it's impossible, I'll never be able to replace all that crap. It's just very annoying. I really want to pull all my hair out trying to (re)build something like GCC or anything using AutoTools (./configure) as it often fails for insane reasons. It's just crazy that nobody can write something "simple" that works. The ./configure script is so damn big (I saw one that was 1.6 MB ... freakin' hell!) that you wonder what it's doing. Yeah, just insane.

Okay, rant over. I'm just saying, it's a lot easier to just stick with what you've got. However, you'll be much poorer for it as you won't be able to try various things. It just seems silly to only choose a tool based upon popularity instead of suitability. However, there's only so far you can swim against the tide.

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