[bitc-dev] Archive library formats

[Michelle Beloshitsky]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:32:39 +0600, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.com>  
wrote:

> My concern here is that I don't want to maintain archive library readers
> for billions of formats -- especially when I am unable to test the
> readers on platforms that I do not have.
>
> Can somebody say how many linker archive library formats are in active
> use under Windows? If a Windows archive library contains something that
> is not an object file, will that file be ignored by the Windows linker?

Under Windows now as far as i know there are 2 types of systems, that wide  
spreaded:

1. Ports of *nix utilites (GNU tools, tcc etc) which seems to use GNU  
archive library format (*.a extension).
2. Microsoft C/C++ tools. It's seems to use it's own extended version of  
COFF archive library format  
(http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/PECOFF.mspx).

Yet there are borland C/C++ tools and digital mars tools with it's library  
format OMF. But imho it's now wide spreaded.

-- 

See ya,
          Michelle Beloshitsky aka itanko