Re: Got dropped...

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> By the way, if anyone happens to have an archives of any messages since 
> Dec 1, 2003 in mbox format I would greatly appreciate a copy.  There is 
> almost nothing worse than SF's interface to mailing list archives.

Thanks to Ed, I'm now more-or-less caught up with the mailing list.  It 
seems clear that we need to get a 0.98.39 release out as soon as it's 
practical... if people can check things in I could make one on Tuesday, 
but if not it'll have to wait until January.

I would really like to deprecate 16-bit NASM formally at thing point. 
That beast is giving us nothing but trouble, and keeps us from doing 
sane things in the source, including but not limited to the ridiculous 
memory allocation interfaces.

Going from there, I see a few things as being absolutely criticial:

- Saner backends, at least the ELF output is full of bugs.  Can we use 
libbfd?
- 64-bit support.  x86-64 has gained huge momentum.  This means new 
backends!
- On the note above, actually use portable types; use <inttypes.h> and 
provide substitutes for those that don't have it, if those compilers 
still matter.

On the subject of "compilers which still matter"... this is perhaps a 
somewhat odd comment, but are there any x86 platforms which matter which 
still don't have a working and well-maintained port of gcc?  DOS has 
DJGPP, Win32 has MingW, and gcc is the native compiler for most of the 
Unixy variants (except Solaris, but gcc runs fine on it, and the Sun 
compiler is sane.)  If nothing else, it would let us raise the baseline 
feature set expected by a compiler.  Perhaps it's not really that big of 
a deal; after all most of the issues are library issues.  The #1 
compiler issue, of course, is uint64_t support (one can write a C++ 
class for it if one has to deal with a platform that has C++ but no 
64-bit integer support).

        -hpa


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