On ELF/shared libraries

From: Levork (fongj@helix.net)
Date: 11/18/95


I'm not about to add any fuel to the list split debate.. instead I thought
I might bring up a subject worth discussing. I was idly flipping through
some Linux ELF documentation about how to create shared libraries. Anyways
there was a really interesting passage that leaped out at me: 

" Other suggestions for dynamic loading have included super-fast MUDs,
where extra code could be compiled and linked into the running executable
without having to stop and restart the program."

Naturally this sounded pretty cool, so I flipped through some ELF
programming documentation. And it actually seems possible to do wrt
Circle. 

My question is, has anyone else tried this? And how portable is it? I know
SunOS supports elf libs, SGI has something pretty simiar (dso libs? 
something like that) but that's all that comes to mind. Basically what I
have in mind is to have interpreter.c as a "main" function of sorts, and
use pointers in interpreter.c to functions in shared libs, i.e. point all
the ACMD(macros) to shared library versions, and then load shared library
version on demand. Probably not the best strategy but it's all I came up
with. 

Unfortunately my site only has BSD (my home computer has Linux) so this 
may remain forever only a thing for me to play with.. oh well. :)

Levork



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