On 11/13/24 7:54 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Much as I appreciate Adrian's efforts to keep up with user space
development, I won't be in a position to help with an ABI change.
Thanks, I will then just do it myself with brute force or drop the port.
Adrian
Look at it philosophically. One path is to dig in and try to change as
little as possible to keep the oldest systems working.
The other is to do your best to adapt to keep the greatest relevant to
modern development.
The former is the path (IMHO) towards eventual actions like m68k getting
removed from the kernel entirely. The latter encourages creative
external efforts like the vampire with 68080 project. Which feeds
current relevance and interest.
So just based on that I think I would want to follow the path that
results in the most modern software compatibility which has the bonus of
reducing friction with upstream developers.
This has been a thing in the Atari/freemint world. Binutils dropped
a.out support and the platform executable is a hybrid of a.out. A
clever developer has solved the issue by crafting a hybrid elf format
that is still natively compatible. This also inches the platform
towards potential shared libraries and virtual memory. This probably
never would have happened if binutils didn't force the issue.
Fwiw, I love the idea of building with rust, llvm, etc for this
platform. Maybe the reality is that it will be a non-starter due to
performance and memory requirements caused by the alignment. I am not
informed enough to judge that.
I'll be quiet again now ;)
Thanks,
Mark
