Talk:AS86

Deletion

I am tempted to delete this. When I searched for as86, the first hit was this article. It doesn't have anything to do with GNU as far as I can see. The last release seems to have been in 1997 or 2002 or 2004 or something. There's no website as far as I can track down. The project seems to also contain a ld86. It also goes by the names of bin86 (name of package in debian [1]), dev86, or linux86. It seems to have been developed by a Bruce Evans. The project seems pretty obsolete by now and is only of historical interest. I can't quite imagine how this can be useful to anyone osdeving today. A website for this appears to be [2] with timestamps from this decade. Probably a fork. See the #osdev logs for 2016-07-22 for a discussion with a bit more information. --Sortie 09:19, 22 July 2016 (CDT)

At least it doesn't show up as the first hit on google for me. Instead, I stumbled on a man page that documents it as once being the assembler for the Linux kernel. I don't want to get rid of it (especially considering its former glory), so I tried turning it more into a big "go away" sign instead. - Combuster 01:40, 25 July 2016 (CDT)

Replying to that comment, I actually would like to see this article expanded, to include a description of the internal structure of the object file as86 outputs (and ld86 takes as input). The reason is, NASM actually can output object files in this format if you use the "-f as86" command line switch. The documentation for NASM describes it as a simple format, but provides no description of the actual internal structure for this file format. Since it sounds fairly simple, I'd like to try to write my own loader or linker for this file format, just as an exercise, but I have no idea what the internal structure of the file format is, so I can't really attempt to make such a program at the current time, unfortunately. So it would be very nice if you actually expanded this article to include a description of the internal structure of this object file format. - Videogamer555 06:39, 12 August 2023 (CDT)