[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?

[Clem and TUHS dropped from CC] Hi Paul, At 2023-06-12T19:04:31-0400, Paul Winalski wrote: It was really just a fart joke--you know, "breaking wind" and all that. libcrt0.s -> libfrt0.s ... But you're getting at an actual problem I had when trying to learn linking and loading on Unix beyond the level of recipes keyed in by rote. (My upbringing was on systems with the most minimal conceivable object file formats, and your runtime support was in either in ROM or you provided it yourself.) Being of a certain age, 'crt0' (a name preserved by the GNU C compiler) looked to me for all the world like it must have had to do with driving a CRT. This made little sense to me, especially when the darn thing got shoved into computation-only programs that performed no I/O at all. I could find no documentation, nor at that time any local experts who could tell me what the heck "crt" was _for_. (The BSD advocates I knew back in the day suggested that this was my fault for not locating and apprenticing myself to such a master; the guild mentality was, and in some ways still is, powerful there.) I am probably not the only person who was sent down an incorrect chain of deductions by this "economical" naming convention; furthermore, one employed for the sake of a file name that almost no one ever typed anyway. To bang an old drum of mine, while Unix culture pats itself on the back for economizing keystrokes with an ad hoc compression scheme for every name in sight, it too often overlooks what discarded in pursuit of this form of minimality: clarity, lack of ambiguity, and ease of acquisition by newcomers. I get that Teletypes were hard to type on and baud rates were punitively low. But when Bell Labs got the Blit, the limitations that motivated the original terseness were not only not discarded, but retained and doubled down on. "We're going multi-architecture for Plan 9, so let's allocate every machine architecture we'll ever be presented with an identifier from a single-character alphanumeric namespace." Madness.[1] Decades after tcsh brought tab-completion to the shell-using masses, and just as many decades after this feature was cloned by every Unix shell that wasn't moribund, the defenders of keystroke minimality aren't content to cultivate their own private name space of single-letter shell functions, scripts, or aliases--instead they rebut the above by complaining that GNU-style architecture triples are way too long. Way too long for what? To type out in full? Sure. Too long to tell you what ABI the objects produced are going to use? No. At least APL chose sigils that were tough to confuse with other things. Thanks for mentioning this. I think you had pointed this out some months ago, but I had difficulty remembering the details of "who had solved the ABI problem the right way a long time ago", but could not remember enough of it to dredge it up even with repeated searches. Unfortunately Google remains stymied even by the quite explicit terms "tom hastings" vax vms abi ...do you have a link to a white paper I could read? I have an ecosystem in mind that might be receptive to the concept. Regards, Branden [1] NAME 0c, 1c, 2c, 5c, 6c, 7c, 8c, kc, qc, vc - C compilers [...] DESCRIPTION These commands compile the named C files into object files for the corresponding architecture. If there are multiple C files, the compilers will attempt to keep $NPROC compilations running con currently. Associated with each compiler is a string objtype, for example 0c spim little-endian MIPS 3000 family 1c 68000 Motorola MC68000 2c 68020 Motorola MC68020 5c arm little-endian ARM 6c amd64 AMD64 and compatibles (e.g., Intel EM64T) 7c alpha Digital Alpha APX 8c 386 Intel i386, i486, Pentium, etc. kc sparc Sun SPARC qc power Power PC vc mips big-endian MIPS 3000 family