Takes 32-bit OMF .obj files (produced by nasm -f obj) plus a PMODE/W or DOS/32A extender stub binary and emits an MZ+LE executable that runs on FreeDOS / DOSBox / QEMU+FreeDOS / dos_emu / real DOS without an extra dos4gw.exe redistribution.

Designed for the i386/DOS retro-compiler family: uc386 (C23) and ucpp386 (C++) both use pyle to ship .exe artifacts without an Open Watcom installation on the build host. (Open Watcom has no native macOS build, so wlink-based pipelines can't run on a Mac; pyle removes that dependency.)

Extracted from uc386/addons/harness/pyle.py into a sibling package so both compilers can consume it. Mirrors how the peephole optimizer became upeep386 and how upeepz80 serves the Z80 compiler family.

pip install pyle

Or from source:

pip install -e .

from pathlib import Path
from pyle import parse_omf, link, write_le, STUB_DIR

objects = [parse_omf(Path("user.obj")), parse_omf(Path("bridge.obj"))]
image   = link(objects)
stub    = (STUB_DIR / "pmodew_stub.bin").read_bytes()
write_le(image, stub, entry_symbol="_pmodew_start",
         out_path=Path("user.exe"))

For DOS/32A: pass bind_dos32a_stub(raw_dos32a_bytes) to write_le instead, with explicit_stack_object=True. DOS/32A isn't bundled — fetch DOS32A.EXE from https://archive.org/details/dos32a-912-bin (zlib license).

CLI: pyle user.obj bridge.obj -o user.exe.

• 32-bit USE32 segments only: _TEXT class=CODE, _DATA class=DATA, _BSS class=BSS.
• Fixup kinds: rel32 (self-relative offset, used by call/jmp rel32) and off32 (32-bit absolute offset, used by mov eax, _label).
• Multiple input objects, cross-object PUBDEF/EXTDEF resolution.
• Single linker pass; produces an MZ+LE with the extender stub bundled as the MZ portion (the .exe is self-contained).

No 16-bit code, no far jumps, no COMDAT. Use Open Watcom's wlink when you need a richer linker.

• pyle.py — the linker (OMF parser + LE emitter + small linker).
• pmodew_stub.bin — the PMODE/W extender as a ready-to-prepend blob (~9 KB). BSD-ish license; bundled with permission.

GPL-3.0-or-later for the linker code itself. The bundled extender stubs ship under their respective upstream licenses (PMODE/W: free-for-any-use with attribution).