On 17/03/2016 21:29, Richard Henderson wrote: >> > ...Windows is something other than both of those, right? >> > Or does it use ELF these days? > PECOFF. But it still supports named sections, so not a deal-breaker. > We just don't support old a.out systems (e.g. really old OpenBSD).
FWIW Windows also supports sorted sections. You could put the "first" symbol in data.trace_events$AAA, the last symbol in data.trace_events$ZZZ and the intermediate symbols in data.trace_events$FOO; the linker would merge them into a single data.trace_events section and you wouldn't have to ensure the correct order of the object files on the command line. It's actually a pretty cool feature. It makes such linker tricks much easier to do. But it's not portable. Paolo