Announce: 16-bit 8086 gcc and linker projects

[DJ Delorie]

[Note: this message is cross-posted. Please be careful to edit the
newsgroups list if you reply to this message. - DJ]

A while ago, I became interested in producing some 16-bit development
tools (probably because of djasm, opendos, freedos, and other "grass
roots" projects in the 16-bit world). I did some work towards that
goal, but recently I've lost interest. Rather than wasting my
efforts, I'm letting everyone see what I've gotten so far. If anyone
wants to take over these projects, let me know, otherwise I'll
continue to act as a maintainer (applying patches, making
distributions, keeping the web pages) for people that want to submit
patches.

The two projects I've done are as follows:

* gcc targetted to the 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU.

* a 16-bit OBJ linker called "djlink".

The main web page for these is http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/16bit/

The gcc work consists mainly of writing the back-end for the 16-bit
mode of the 8086 CPU (i86.{md,c,h}). I intentionally left out any
32-bit support; "int" is 16-bit and "long" makes the compiler abort!
The output format is for NASM. If you use a linker other than djlink
(which I recommend, until djlink gets the rest of its basic
functionality) you'll have to manually edit gcc.c to call the right
linker.

The 16-bit linker I call "djlink". The only other GNU linker is
binutils, and it doesn't support 16-bit OBJ (and it was easier to
write a new linker than to fit obj into bfd). It also isn't complete;
it doesn't support NASM's ".comm" or ".lcomm", doesn't support more
than 127 symbols per object, and other miscellaneous stuff. Yes, I
know about the "val" linker, but it's not GNU, the sources are a mess,
and you can't use it to cross-link from unix.

Enjoy!

DJ Delorie
d...@delorie.com
http://www.delorie.com/