gas 2.34 on MacOS

[Kevan Hashemi]

Dear Nick,

> To start with I would suggest investigating
> the assembler.

I have been doing some investigating. The CLANG assembler on MacOS works fine for assembler produced by GCC or CLANG compilers, so long as we're not using GCC 3 or earlier. With GCC 3 or earlier, the -g option produces .stab directives that the CLANG assembler does not recognise. Assembler produced by GCC 4 and later causes no problems, because they don't use .stabs directives.

So, that's why nobody has ported gas or ld 2.34 to MacOSX: there appears to be no need. What we need on MacOSX is the other binutils, and they are all ported. I won't bore you with why I was messing around with GCC 3, but suffice to say I have worked around my need to use GCC 3, and my conclusion is that the existing Binutils port to MacOSX does everything it needs to do.

Best, Kevan

-- 
Kevan Hashemi, Electrical Engineer
Physics Department, Brandeis University
http://www.bndhep.net