Summary of current change suggestions

Alastair Reid reid at cs.utah.edu
Thu Feb 22 13:27:20 EST 2001


> Marcin just pointed out that you can use dlopen() in a way
> that it finds symbols without a library name.  That should
> do, I think.

Note that finding a marginally easier way to do the lookup doesn't address my
concern that this undirected search will cause maintenance and porting problems
by worsening an already bad situation (just which library did
Linux/solaris/freebsd/hpux/redhat6.0/redhat7.0/... choose to hide a symbol in).

In fact, I expect that having dlopen do a search through the libraries that it
thinks are relevant instead of Hugs performing a search through the list of
libraries that it knows to be relevant probably makes things worse because it
increases the gap between the programmer's mental model and what actually
happens.


Alastair

ps dlopen is not completely portable - Hugs also uses shl_{load,findsym} (HPUX
only?) and {LoadLibrary, GetProcAddress} (Win32).





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