On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 23:38, Benjamin Geer wrote:
> Xavier Leroy wrote:
> > (As far as "hassling" goes, this will only reinforce my conviction
> > that shared libraries are useless.  So, don't do that.)
> 
> I don't mean to hassle you, but could you explain this conviction a bit? 
>   If shared libraries are useless, why do all Unix and Linux programs 
> use libc as a shared library? 

This isn't really what I call dynamic loading though, 
but lazy static binding.

By dynamic loading *I* mean the module to load is computed
at run time depending on inputs to the program.

> If Caml could make shared libraries, perhaps those sorts of 
> libraries (very large libraries, meant to be used by many small 
> programs) would have a better chance of being written in Caml.

Yes. There is a tension between dynamically loading which is
possible with bytecode, and generation of dynamically loadable
native code.

The former is interesting but not industrially satisfying
because it doesn't allow dynamic loading of interfaces
to C, which must be native code.

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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