Why I love open source.....

I feel sorry for the people who are stuck with MPLAB/MPLINK etc.

You may have seen a tread on the piclist where I proposed a technique
which relies on the linker putting code into segments in the order
the .o files are given on the linker command line.

I thought it was a reasonable assumption to make and a few tests proved
it to be the observed behaviour.  Afterall any other order would seem to
be perverse (except maybe doing it in reverse order). 

MPLAB users poo-pooed my idea because "It uses undocumented features of
the linker".....

So I looked at the gplink sources.......   I'm still happily using my
technique because I know what gplink is doing,  and if that behaviour
changes, I'll still know what it is doing so I can adapt my techique.
MPLAB users arn't so lucky !

This is one of the reasons I ditched all M$ products years ago.  The
little bit of Windows programming I did do (back in the days of Windows
3.1 ) always seemed to run up against bugs/quirks or undocumented
behaviour in the M$ APIs and libraries.  With out the source I quickly
became frustrated.  

BTW the technique means I can include drivers for various devices (like
UART,TMRx,LCDdisplays) by simply including the appropriate ".o" file in
the liker command and adding EXTERN declarations for the device API.
The overhead is a small ISR and a bit of generic startup code.  No need
to worry about the device initialisation or interrupt handlers as they
all get included and called automagically.

Peter