From: root AT jacob DOT remcomp DOT fr (root) Subject: Re: MUCH faster cygwin dll 18 Feb 1998 20:17:45 -0800 Message-ID: References: Content-Type: text To: cgf AT bbc DOT com Cc: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Mr Faylor writes: > > I just noticed this too. This seems to occur when two dlls try to occupy > the the same base address. I tried using 0x61000000 instead, as someone > else mentioned. That seemed to work better. This is kind of ridiculous. If I understand correctly this correspondece, this means that you are relocating the dlls by hand instead of letting the operating system decide where to load them with changing addressing conditions? Normally, for all windows programs, there exists a .reloc section in the executable, that tells the loader the relative location of all pointers in the image. Then, the loader can put the new dll anywhere in the addressing space of the vm it wants to load it in. It seems then that acknowledging that gnu's linker is broken you have returned to the 'solution' of moving your dlls around by yourself and replacing the system loader. This will never work OK of course, but it is a better solution than nothing. If you say it like this in the list however, people will think that this is *normal* imagine. That for loading a dll you have to tell the system the hexadecimal address of where you want it loaded. What a user friendly environment!!!! "Installation instruction for my software written using cygnus: ... Before using my program, please figure out (in hexadecimal) the address where you want it loaded in the vm's virtual space. If you do not know what a dll or an address is, well then... ... " This is an example of a bug that will never get fixed, as I said in this list almost a year ago. It has *never* worked for dlls and it will *never* do it. On March 25th 1997 I wrote to this list: Nobody in the world understands 'ld'. (in the subject line) Then I forecasted that this bug will never get fixed since Steve Chamberlain, the person that wrote the win32 part of 'ld' left cygnus. That was a year ago. It is true that Mr Taylor has fixed some (other) problems. But the dll bug is just too much, and people are confronted with bugs they can't understand nor handle. There are *DOZENS* of messages (at least) each month with people totally confused. A great contribution to reducing the bandwidth of this list would be to add to the FAQ: "The linker doesn't work for dlls. PERIOD." I follow this group because I am interested in free software. It is a pity that the reputation of free software, that is very often of a very good quality, suffers from this unending blemish. -- Jacob Navia Logiciels/Informatique 41 rue Maurice Ravel Tel 01 48.23.51.44 93430 Villetaneuse Fax 01 48.23.95.39 France - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".