Re: [Chicken-users] purpose of dynamic Chicken libraries?

[felix winkelmann]

On 2/16/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
> For what purposes are dynamic Chicken libraries really essential?  Right
> now I'm winning; my -DPIC problems were merely a typo in a define.  But,
> building dynamic libraries is definitely a source of complication and
> maintenance difficulty.  An associate who offered to help me out,
> suggested that I just drop it, that it's pointless in the scheme of
> things.  I replied that I didn't know enough about how people use
> Chicken to make that decision.  So, I am asking you, how / why do you
> use dynamic libraries?  If you didn't have them available, how would
> that impact you?

Do you mean dynamic libraries of the kind like libchicken.dll or dynamically
loadable, compiled code (eggs, essentially)?
There are basically these reasons:
- reduce memory-usage by allowing multiple executing programs to refer
  to the same code image
- allow dynamically loaded code to link with the runtime-system of the
  loading executable, which is not always possible (Windows, I think) without
  putting the r/t into a dll

Handling the peculiarities of building dlls on different OSes is PITA, I agree
with you there. But I seee no reason to use a different approach. Chicken is
not a whole-program compiler and uses dynamic linking and loading to a
large extent.


cheers,
felix