Abstract
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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Reed, P.: Building Your Own Tools - An Oberon Industrial Case Study. In: Weck, W., Gutknecht, J. (eds.) JMLC 2000. LNCS, vol. 1897, Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Wirth, N., Gutknecht, J.: Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1992)
Wirth, N.: A Plea for Lean Software. IEEE Computer 28(2) (1995)
Burgoyne, K.: Article 4 – Structure of an Application Program. In: Duncan, R. (ed.) MS-DOS Encyclopedia. Microsoft Press, Redmond (1988)
OpenBSD Man pages, http://www.openbsd.org
Executable and Linkable Format - Tools Interface Standards, Portable Formats Specification, Version 1.1. UNIX Systems Laboratories
Apple Computer, Inside Macintosh. Addison Wesley, Reading (1985)
Brothers, D.F.: Macintosh Binary Transfer Format MacBinary Standard Proposal. Micro-networked Apple User’s Group (1985)
Introduction to File Formats, PalmSource Inc. (2002), http://www.palmos.com
Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification. Microsoft Corporation, http://www.microsoft.com
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Reed, P. (2003). An Oberon Linker for an Imperfect World – More Notes on Building Your Own Tools. In: Böszörményi, L., Schojer, P. (eds) Modular Programming Languages. JMLC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2789. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45213-3_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45213-3_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40796-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45213-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive