Tomas Hajny wrote:
On Tue, September 9, 2014 10:20, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
.
.
I was wondering whether a completely empty program would be a better
test than a "Hello, World!". Could a completely empty program be
recognised by the compiler etc. as a special case and built with only
minimal RTL initialisation, specifically as a test that a program will
load and terminate in good order i.e. that FPC and the OS are
compatible? Or is there a set of portable options that will already do
this, which could be documented prominently?
After all, there's been comparable issues on ARM, and there might be
more on various platforms in the future.
Isn't there a risk that behaviour of a program not doing anything might
look the same as behaviour of a program failing/crashing before doing what
it was asked to do?
In addition, what is the supposed difference between an "empty program"
and program "built with only minimal RTL initialisation"?
I don't see why something like this
program test;
begin
end.
should use anything other than the absolute minimum that's needed to
terminate in good order. At that point gdb (or strace etc.) should be
able to confirm that it's terminated rather than crashing, and that
would be useful confirmation that as far as the OS and system libraries
were concerned the binary format (ELF header etc.) was OK.
After all, when this sort of problem has been raised in the past we've
usually started off by scratching our heads over whether the user had
somehow screwed the file, or had built it with the wrong endianness or
for an inappropriate CPU. It would be useful to be able to eliminate
some of these possible conditions.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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