This is a continuation of the discussion in #1443 (comment), regarding issues getting what is hopefully the latest version of a C86 compiler and @rafael's port of its included (older) NASM assembler running on ELKS.

At the moment, there is some consideration of using Dev86's CPP C preprocessor, producing Dev86-compatible AS86 format object file out from NASM, and possibly using Dev86's LD linker, as both CPP and LD are (hopefully) likely to be easily ported to the ELKS 8086-only environment.

I'm not sure where the best current sources are for Dev86 - it used to be that @jbruchon hosted them on Github, and that versions' upstream is quite old, but still present: https://github.com/lkundrak/dev86. It seems that jbruchon has moved his version to Codeberg at https://codeberg.org/jbruchon/dev86. During the last four years, I am aware of a number of bug fixes posted to his repo when it used to be on Github. I would recommend starting with jbruchon's Dev86 unless another more updated version is found on Github.

ELKS shares quite a history with Dev86, just five years ago the entire kernel and C library were compiled using its BCC->AS86->LD toolchain. The ELKS C library had originally bin in dev86/libc but had been moved prior to that.

While it could make sense to use Dev86's CPP and LD in order to get C86 running more quickly on ELKS, unfortunately the BCC compiler is K&R only, and doesn't support ANSI C at all.

@rafael2k, which repo are using for your CPP and future LD ports? I would assume that if you can get them running, both will be moved into your https://github.com/rafael2k/8086-toolchain repo.