Original bug ID: 54
Reporter: administrator
Status: closed
Resolution: fixed
Priority: normal
Severity: feature
Category: ~DO NOT USE (was: OCaml general)

Bug description

Full_Name: Gerd Stolpmann
Version: 2.04
OS:
Submission from: master.proxy.ision.net (195.180.208.40)

Hi,

I have a OCaml program which is embedded in another (C) program; I did
this by using the -output-obj option of the (bytecode) compiler. This
alone works fine; but if I try to initialize the Dynlink library (calling
Dynlink.init), the runtime system wants to read the bytecode executable
again to get the symbol table. The code in Symtable.init_toplevel reads
the file in argv.(0) and interprets it as bytecode executable. Of course,
in my program it is impossible to read such an executable because there
is not any.

I use currently a hack to get around this limitation: I wrote a shell script
that outputs the list of primitives to stdout; I built a "pseudo executable"
using ocamlc -use-runtime /name/of/shellscript. That way, the produced bytecode
should be identical, and the executable contains a symbol table. Finally,
I set Sys.argv.(0) to the path of the pseudo executable before invoking
Dynlink.init.

I think it is much better to repair the runtime system; the -output-obj
option could also force the compiler to put a symbol table into the generated
object file, and Dynlink.init should be able to read this symbol table.