I'm sorry for posting a slightly off-topic question, but I think this
forum has many people who know about what I'd like to ask: are there
any current or future platforms that use, or can be reasonably
expected to use, the COFF format for their binary files?
Background: Emacs has a bunch of implementation of unexec, one each
for every ABI used by platforms that Emacs can be built on. (unexec
is a method of generating an executable binary file from an in-memory
image of a running program.) There are, for example, unexelf.c for
ELF, unexw32.c for pe-coff, etc. There's also unexcoff.c (renamed
yesterday from unexec.c), which was the original implementation
supporting a.out and COFF. Nowadays, it is used only by the MSDOS
(a.k.a. DJGPP) build of Emacs.
The main issue is this: since only the MSDOS build uses unexcoff.c, I
was asked to clean it up of code that is #ifdef'ed away for the DOS
build. My question is: can we reasonably assume that no future
platform where it makes sense to build Emacs will ever want to use
COFF? If some modern low-end platforms (e.g., some mobile ones) use
or could use COFF, then perhaps some of the code currently unused by
the DOS build should be left in unexcoff.c, for the benefit of these
platforms.