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Early mid February extensions to WarpLink
This is not actually a regulation Sunday blog post as I didn't prepare it on the HP 95LX, due to the place I usually write these being closed for the carnival days.
This week I prepared some new extensions to the WarpLink OMF linker, most of which was originally written in 1989 through 1993, and released to the public domain in 1999. I have been working on WarpLink since 2023.
The new extensions I did as yet are split into three categories:
- wlemitalign, sections which emit their alignment even if they are empty or part of the nobits trail.
- wlcalc, post-link calculations that are applied to the executable file after the main linking is done.
- wllist, allowing to collect patch lists pointing into certain segments without having to manually update the lists.
Early February work on WarpLink
2026-02-08
This week I worked on WarpLink some and a bit on the lDOS kernel. The lDOS changes are to make use of a new feature, the WLCALC post-link calculation.
Chasing a WarpLink bug
Today I used the current WarpLink revision, "release 4 by ecm (2025 September)", trying to peruse some details in preparation for a new feature. Cue my surprise when it failed to link even the simplest examples!
Late January work on TracList
2026-02-01
The idea of these changes is to take an existing trace listing (.tls) file of the lDOS kernel and find corresponding offsets within the MS-DOS v7.10 kernel. As they're both based on the same code base, I expect that there will be some similarities remaining.
Overview of educational topics
This article lists some topics I think any education on program logic work should cover. I collected these notes over several months, though I have thought about many of these for years at this point.
