Back to home page

DOS ain't dead

Forum index page

Log in | Register

Search:  
Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view

FASM can't understand OMF ".OBJ" files (Announce)

posted by Japheth Homepage, Germany (South), 01.01.2009, 19:33

> OMF is really only necessary for linking between HLLs and assembly
That's a very simplistic view of a linker. Linker can be useful/necessary if no HLLs are involved at all. They are even useful if there's just a single module to be linked to a binary.

> OMF is complex, which Tomasz has lamented before. But yes, no OMF support
> in FASM does vaguely limit its usefulness. However, no one has volunteered
> to add it thus far, so they must not need it too bad ("why reinvent the
> wheel?" NASM, WASM, LZASM, MASM, TASM, A86/A386, Arrowsoft, SOLASM, etc.
> etc.). Windows and Linux don't use it, and that's 90% of the popular
> market right there.
That's true, but the argument has little weight. An assembler which claims to support 16bit has to support OMF. OMF is complex because it's very old, created in a time when the need to reduce space did justify virtually everything. But hey, noone did claim that writing an assembler is pure fun. There are always tasks which are boring and dull. The difference between a hobby project and a tool of professional quality is that the "boring" things have been done as well in the latter case.

> How is it a disadvantage?
Asm is less portable. An assembler is among those kind of tools where the higher degree of portability of C is a REAL advantage.

A second disadvantage is that a self-compiling tools can worsen the effect of undetected bugs. If a buggy tool is used for compilation, pretty strange effects are likely to occur, sometimes very hard to fix.

---
MS-DOS forever!

Post reply
 

Complete thread:

Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view
22756 Postings in 2121 Threads, 402 registered users (1 online)
DOS ain't dead | Admin contact
RSS Feed
powered by my little forum