Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Object formats
Summary: What do they look like & how many exist out there
Keywords: .o, .bin
Message-ID: <789@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 2 Sep 88 20:14:49 GMT
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 24

Hi folks!
I'd like to extend my disassembler (one of my 'current programming
projects' 8-) with an option to disassemble object files (you know,
those files left by your compiler to be linked into an executable
program).

What I would like to know:
a) How many different formats do exist? The ones I know of are TOS
format (extension .o) and GST format (extension .bin). Are there any
(many ?) others?
b) What do these formats look like? I've been fiddling with dumps of
GST objects and I can recognize certain patterns, but this seems a hard
way to go.  Any official documentation? (must be, since for instance
Lattice uses a GST linker for their objects).
c) Libraries: for the GST linker a library is just a file that is a
concatenation of object files; does anyone know of more clever linkers
(those that can handle random access libraries)? I think the speed of
the GST linker leaves to be desired (perhaps I should wait for the GNU
stuff?).

E-mail preferably; I'll summarize. But if you think you're a guru on
this topic, feel free to teach us poor earthly creatures 8-).

            Leo.