[fpc-devel] 2.0.4-rc3 available

[Florian Klaempfl]

Tomas Hajny wrote:
> The following alternatives would be possible:
> 
> 1) FPC already has internal assembler and linker, but these don't support
> the OS/2 target at the moment. Changing the assembler part to support
> output of a.out object files wouldn't make much sense, so you'd basically
> need to change both sides in parallel (although you could possibly use a
> different external linker in the first phase, like LINK386.EXE distributed
> with OS/2 or Watcom linker). Alternatively, it might be possible to switch
> to Watcom assembler and Watcom linker for OS/2 target - somebody
> experimented with that in the past, but he didn't manage to bring it to
> useable state.
> 
> 2) Function for accessing ports requires special segment in the resulting
> executable. Support for that would need to be added in internal linker,
> but both LINK386.EXE and WLINK.EXE can handle that without problems. GDB
> is another story - there's no GDB able to handle regular OS/2 executable
> format (LX - based on Intel OMF). Alternative debuggers exist (e.g. Watcom
> debugger, SDD from IBM and debugger for Virtual Pascal/2), but there's no
> support for their integration with FPC so far. Out of them, only Watcom
> debugger might be compatible with debug info format produced with FPC.

This is imo the way to go because the Watcom debugger supports dwarf.