DOCUMENTATION:
-The internals of gas need documenting.
+The internals of gas need documenting. (Actually, there is some documentation
+in doc/as.texinfo, but it's *way* out of date.)
-Roland's going to work on removing the m4 processing from the user
-documentation. With the latest texinfo code, it's not needed.
+The documentation should also contain a "Trouble" section similar to gcc's
+manual: real bugs, common problems, incompatibilities, etc.
Anyone want to offer to maintain a man page?
Eliminate, as much as possible, anything not in config that is conditionalized
on a CPU, format, or environment.
+Merge COFF support into one version, supporting all the pseudo-ops used in
+either versions now, but using BFD for high-level operations. (See second
+following item.) Currently there are two versions (plus the new BFD code),
+which support different features, and are used on different targets.
+
+Convert remaining a.out/b.out targets to using the BFD_ASSEMBLER code by
+default.
+
Finish conversion to using BFD for all object file writing. (This is the
BFD_ASSEMBLER code, not BFD or BFD_HEADERS.) VMS might be the tough one here,
-since there's no BFD support for it at all yet. Eliminate the old code.
+since there's no BFD support for it at all yet. Eliminate the old code. Some
+of this can be done target by target, so doing a target where the CPU or
+format already supports BFD_ASSEMBLER mode may be easiest.
+
+Fix lots of uses of empty strings to use null pointers. Will improve
+efficiency, and should make code clearer too.
Clean up comments; lots of 'em are one previous maintainer griping about
another previous maintainer, unrelated to the code. (And with no names,
they're not so fun to read. :-)
-Get Steve to document H8/500 stuff.
+For sparc: "call 0" becomes "jmpl %g0,%l7", and similarly for absolute
+addresses in -4096...4095. (Solaris assembler does this. No
+relocation required, no absolute symbol needed.) For addresses
+outside the range, for COFF, keep generating an absolute symbol to use
+for relocs.
+
+Get Steve to document H8/500 stuff (and others).
+
+Improve test suite. Incorporate more reported net bugs, and non-confidential
+Cygnus customer bugs, and anything else.
+
+Add support for i386/i486 16-bit mode, so operating system initialization code
+doesn't require a separate assembler nor lots of `.byte' directives.
+
+See if it's more maintainable (and not too much of a performance loss) to use
+a yacc grammar for parsing input. The lexer will have to be flexible, and the
+grammar will have to contain any construct used on any platform, but it may be
+easier to maintain, instead of having code in most of the back ends.
-Put together a test suite, using DejaGnu.
+PIC support.
(From old "NOTES" file to-do list, not really reviewed:)
projects / binutils.git / blobdiff