At 12:54 PM 2/10/99 +0200, you wrote:
Idea/question - Can all code be limited to using relative addressing so no linking is necessary?
Why not to use linking ?
I was thinking that it would be easier to create the configuration too and have it work on any platform if all it had to do was collect and tabulate binaries, and convert them to a hex file. If you assume that you are creating a boot prom for a system that has none, it would be nice if you could use whatever other systems you do have (M$-win, Mac, Linux, HP, Sun, whatever) as your boot-prom development system. I think that creating a working linker and collecting the correct libraries and other resources etc. would be much more complex task for the developers and certainly harder to get working for the persons who are trying to create custom boot PROMs.
Probably you will need at least one specific tool to burn new image into PROM.
Thats pretty much what I was thinking. But I was thinking that having the tool only responsible for interacting with the user, collecting and tabulating a set of binaries and then converting them to a single HEX file, would be much simpler than creating a linker. Of course I may be thinking of this wrong since I have never written a linker and would not know where to begin if I had to :)
Dave