Re: COFF Vs. Elf

> Yahya Mirza <70004.2121@CompuServe.COM> writes:
> Hi everybody,
>
> Has anbody out there written code using Elf vs. the COFF image
> file format. Is there any technical documents comparing the two
> with their benefits and drawbacks.
>


I've written code using COFF and am hoping to switch to ELF in the near
future. ELF is a more enhanced version of COFF. Its data structures
are more flexible than COFF. You don't have to throw out all of your old
COFF code to switch over to ELF.


I don't have much hands-on experience with ELF, but I can tell you that
COFF is entirely too rigid and can make changes to a linker quite painful.
ELF has some support for C++, but I don't know much of the details.


Check out the following document.


ELF: From The Programmer's Perspective
http://www.debian.org/Documentation/elf/elf.html


Look at the references in
http://www.cs.unc.edu/linux-docs/HOWTO/ELF-HOWTO.html


There is an excellent file that gives a detail spec of the ELF file format
at ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/packages/GCC/ELF.doc.tar.gz


-Ray Pereda
rpereda@micro.ti.com
--

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