Are we ever likely to see the end of the 'evil mangler'? With gcc 3.x and it's selection of __atribute__ annotations (eg noreturn, pure, const, naked etc) would we be able to iliminate the need for the mangler?

It's not quite there yet. 'naked' looks promising, but the documentation seems to indicate that it doesn't work on all platforms. Also, you need to be able to specify the relative layout of code and data - i.e. layout data in the code section next to a specific chunk of code. We have at various times discussed ways to get rid of the mangler, but all the choices seemt to imply a compromise of one kind or another, on top of being a significant investment in developer effort. That's not to say we won't do it, provided we can settle on a good plan, or that we wouldn't welcome someone else doing it :-) Cheers, Simon