An Oberon Linker for an Imperfect World ―More Notes on Building Your Own Tools

摘要

Experience creating custom application software has taught us that total control over our development tools is a necessity. Project Oberon provided an excellent starting point for us to build our own cross-platform application programming environment. In addition to adapting Wirth's Oberon compiler, we have developed an accompanying linker which creates native programs for popular operating systems such as Windows, MS-DOS, Unix/Linux, Macintosh, and Palm OS. In this case study, we summarise the structure of the linker and some of the executable formats it can generate, and we describe one of the large commercial projects in which it is used. Note that such a linker is not necessary in the Oberon operating system, since the system loads compiled modules directly into memory as needed; sadly many industry-standard operating systems are not as efficient.