Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by phicoh 124 days ago
Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem. Minix-vmd can be compiled with both ACK and GCC.

Unfortunately, when MINIX3 as started, it was copied directly from MINIX2 and a lot of interesting stuff was left out.
1 comments
Rochus 124 days ago
> Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem.

I assume you mean because the assembler was manually migrated in later Minix versions, not because there is a tool which can do so automatically. Or did I miss this?

> and a lot of interesting stuff was left out

Can you please make examples what you mean specifically?

link
phicoh 124 days ago
Yes, there is a tool called asmconv, that converts.

One example is the new compiler driver that can use ACK and GCC from a single compiler driver and that can automatically convert assembler and figure out which archiver to use to create libraries.

Another example is library support for filenames longer than 14 characters that was completely transparent. MINIX3 just broken all backward compatibility by increasing the size of directory entries to a new fixed size.

I'm sure there is more stuff, these are just a few I remember.

link