Original bug ID: 1983
Reporter: administrator
Status: closed (set by @xavierleroy on 2012-01-27T10:52:40Z)
Resolution: fixed
Priority: normal
Severity: feature
Fixed in version: 3.11.0
Category: ~DO NOT USE (was: OCaml general)
Monitored by: nogin

Bug description

Full_Name: Aleksey Nogin
Version: 3.07+2
OS: Red Hat Linux
Submission from: charter-242-037.caltech.edu (131.215.242.37)

It would be really nice if it was possible:

a) to compile a native code OCaml library into an dynamic library (.so)
b) then link an OCaml program against an OCaml .so,
c) dynamically load and OCaml .so from an OCaml program. Ideally, the interface
for doing it would be shared between the bytecode (for dynloading of .cmo) and
native code (for dynloading of .so/.cmxa)

I know that there are a lot of issues if one insists on some smart version
compatibility checking. This RFE is not about that - I would be happy if the
generated libraries were strongly tied to the environment in which they were
compiled and any slight change would require a recompile.

Basically, our project (http://metaprl.org/) will benefit significantly if it
was possible to load modules at runtime - both in bytecode (similarly to the way
camlp4 does it) and native code.

P.S. http://www.boblycat.org/~malc/scaml/ implements something like this.