[fpc-devel] MIPS big-endian program starts but does nothing

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Tomas Hajny wrote:
> On Tue, September 9, 2014 10:20, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>  .
>  .
>> I was wondering whether a completely empty program would be a better
>> test than a "Hello, World!". Could a completely empty program be
>> recognised by the compiler etc. as a special case and built with only
>> minimal RTL initialisation, specifically as a test that a program will
>> load and terminate in good order i.e. that FPC and the OS are
>> compatible? Or is there a set of portable options that will already do
>> this, which could be documented prominently?
>>
>> After all, there's been comparable issues on ARM, and there might be
>> more on various platforms in the future.
> 
> Isn't there a risk that behaviour of a program not doing anything might
> look the same as behaviour of a program failing/crashing before doing what
> it was asked to do?
> 
> In addition, what is the supposed difference between an "empty program"
> and program "built with only minimal RTL initialisation"?

I don't see why something like this

program test;
begin
end.

should use anything other than the absolute minimum that's needed to 
terminate in good order. At that point gdb (or strace etc.) should be 
able to confirm that it's terminated rather than crashing, and that 
would be useful confirmation that as far as the OS and system libraries 
were concerned the binary format (ELF header etc.) was OK.

After all, when this sort of problem has been raised in the past we've 
usually started off by scratching our heads over whether the user had 
somehow screwed the file, or had built it with the wrong endianness or 
for an inappropriate CPU. It would be useful to be able to eliminate 
some of these possible conditions.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]