My current understanding is that the assembler files use some pseudo-ops which work with ELF but not with COFF (the object format on windows), or at least not with gas on COFF.
I'd appreciate if someone with access to and knowledge of windows could figure out precisely what's wrong, and how to fix it.
Alternatives are
* Use some subset of pseudo-ops that works on both windows/coff and unix/elf.
* Use some m4-macros for generating the prologue and epilogue of assembler functions, and setup configure to do the right thing. See for exaxmple how ASM_SYMBOL_PREFIX is chosen by configure, and substituted into config.m4.
* Completely remove all pseudo-ops that only affect debugging information anyway. But it would be nice to keep sufficient information to be able to generate backtraces in gdb.
I'll admit that I don't fully understand what the pseudo-ops are supposed to do on ELF either.