> Xavier, i have been told that this probably happens because we use a elf
> section that is normally strippable.

It's even worse than that, but I won't get into details :-)

> It could be solved by using a
> special elf section specialized to our need (maybe one named bytecode or
> something), then at least strip and possibly the prelink stuff, would
> not remove it as it does not.

Yes, but:
- This solution is not portable to non-ELF platforms (e.g. MS Windows),
  thus forcing an unpleasant fork in the code.
- The ELF format is very complex.  There are libraries that facilitate
  manipulations of ELF files (e.g. libelf), but these are not
  universally available and severely under-documented.

Rather than muck with ELF, a simpler solution would be to embed the
bytecode executable as initialized C arrays in the executable
generated by ocamlc -custom.  That's what ocamlc -output-obj does, and
I believe it shouldn't be too hard to adapt the existing -output-obj
code to the -custom case.

- Xavier Leroy

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