Bart Van Assche wrote: > On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Leisner, Martin > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If you're embedded device has a window system, than a language like C++ > > is fine...But... > > C++ is suited for much more than just windowing systems. A good > example is the GOLD project, a linker for ELF files. GOLD is a rewrite > of the GNU linker (ld). See also > http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/04/gold-google-releases-new-and-improved.html.
Is C++ intrinsic to GOLD's linking superiority over ld? Or was it chosen because the author fancied using it? (I don't know). There's been a resistance to using C++ in GNU programming tools generally for a long time - see GCC which only recently switched to ANSI C. That's because they want the tools to run on lots of platforms, and C++ templates in particular haven't been standardly implemented until the last few years, and probably still aren't on some platforms that they'd like to run GNU tools on. So using C++ in GOLD was a bit of a bold decision :-) What I can't help noticing is that GOLD, while superior for linking straight GNU/Linux applications due to better algorithms, and extremely knowledgable author etc. - it explicitly does not support anything but ELF. It doesn't support the zillions of linker capabilities of GNU binutils ld, and the author says he doesn't intend it to. So it won't ever be suitable for linking some embedded targets - you'll still need to use Binutils ld/objdump or another tool, at least for the last step :-) Binutils' undoing is probably the complexity in its approach to generically supporting every kind of linkable object anywhere. That complexity is the reason we have the ugly 'elf2flt' instead of simply a backend which emits uClinux executable formats. The authors of uClinux tools found it easier to postprocess the output than to write another format backend. I don't think C++ would help a lot with that complexity if you wanted to still support lots of different formats - although another language with versatile metaprogramming might. (There's a lot to choose from). I could be wrong of course. -- Jamie -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
