RFC: ghc's dynamic linker

[Alastair Reid]

> 2. The BFD way 

I just want to remark that anyone contemplating hacking on object
files should steer well clear of BFD which is the most inconsistently
implemented, poorly (though abundantly) documented obstacle to quality
programming it has ever been my misfortune to use.  Particularily
galling is the fact that BFD provides little indication (in
documentation, compile-time errors, etc.) that certain functionality
is completely unimplemented on a particular platform.

In contrast, libelf is widely available (multiple implementations
exist), well documented, a joy to use and covers everything (well,
everything that GHC runs on) but Windows.  

I once had a tool to manipulate .o files using BFD.  When I needed to
upgrade it slightly (to access debugging information as well as normal
symbols), I spent the best part of a week failing to get this small
piece of additional functionality to work with BFD and less than a day
rewriting the whole thing from scratch with libelf.

--
Alastair Reid                 alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk  
Reid Consulting (UK) Limited  http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/

ps It's not clear to me whether BFD uses the wrong abstractions or
simply tries to do too much and so ends up doing a lot badly.  There's
even the (slim) possibility that BFD just needs better documentation
and a few small, simple example programs instead of the multi-thousand
line programs it ships with.  It might be interesting to try to write
a BFD2 which fixes BFDs most glaring problems based on the enormous
amount of experience embodied by BFD's implementation.