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Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2002/12/20/11:59:30

From: sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu (Charles Sandmann)
Message-Id: <10212201701.AA21667@clio.rice.edu>
Subject: Re: LibC loaded Dynamically
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 11:01:23 -0600 (CST)
In-Reply-To: <200212201511.gBKFBbU26698@envy.delorie.com> from "DJ Delorie" at Dec 20, 2002 10:11:37 AM
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> We'd have to support both static and dynamic linking.  I think the
> fact that we *don't* need extra files is a significant advantage over
> cygwin, which always needs that huge DLL on the system.  OTOH, dynamic
> linking would make other DXEs a lot easier to deal with.

With all the flexibility comes confusion - static or dynamic for each
library ... 

> This might be a good time to consider the way ELF does it.  They have
> a separate static linker binary that gets loaded at runtime to perform
> all the relocations.  The libraries are truly shared (i.e. one load
> per system, not per application), and all the tools are there already
> if we choose ELF format.

I've thought a lot about this since we picked our format for V2.00;
even the option for flat linear being our space (relocations at load
time).

We would need to clean up some of our library to make it process
shared, and moving to ELF would require many changes in a lot of 
places.

I'm less excited about this option because we don't nest that often,
and it's a bigger change.

> Another option is to support DLL format directly.  This would add some
> compatibility with cygwin as well, and make djgpp->windows easier.

This was one of the reasons always quoted for sticking with COFF.  
Humm, maybe I should look at this.  For things which don't call 
Windows we should be able to call pure code DLLs.

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