Re: libelf status? status of other binutils alternatives?

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 04:31:41PM -0600, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
 > > Do we have any wiki page or other list keeping track of status of 
 > > alternatives to binutils' components?
 > 
 > Now I found a status tracking page (not NetBSD specific):
 > 
 > http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/elftoolchain/#ImplementationStatus
 > 
 > From a NetBSD perspective ... have any of these replacements been used 
 > by anyone in our toolchain?

That's one project, and it doesn't seem to have gotten very far. Under
ld(1) they have a ticket that says "Create ld(1)". The linker is about
80% of the work and complexity of a new toolchain; the assembler,
which they also don't seem to have started, makes up the other 20% and
the rest is absolutely trivial.

Having talked about this with various groups at various times it seems
like quite a lot of people have half-finished linkers in their
basement, myself included. Nobody seems to quite care enough to make
finishing any of them a really viable proposition.

My code is fairly bitrotten, short on target architectures, and I
didn't have dynamic linking going before the project it was for got
cancelled, but I'd guess it's around 1/3 done and would take maybe
three months of sustained effort to reach a point where it could be
imported and seriously tested/used. (This assumes I don't discover
serious problems when correcting the bitrot, which isn't a foregone
conclusion.) It was at one point capable of linking toy kernels that
booted.

I think several people here have nearly as much or more on hand.

If we want to make this happen, it can be done... the primary obstacle
is that we need to collectively make up our mind to care enough to put
the time in.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost