Re: FFI on OS X?

[Hans Aberg]

On 3 Mar 2011, at 11:40, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>> The crux is that on older MacOS X versions ‘.dylib’ are shared
>>> libraries (not dlopenable), whereas ‘.so’ are “bundles”
>>> (dlopenable).  That’s why lt_dlopenext (which is what ‘dynamic-link’
>>> uses) doesn’t try to open ‘.dylib’ files.
>> 
>> The shared libraries (not dynamically loadable, except as when
>> starting up the program like some web browser plugins) were on the PPC
>> platform (XCOFF and PEF I think it was).
>> 
>> Now (Mac OS 10.5 and later), all is loadable. Haven't seen any .so
>> files, except as coming from GNU/Linux.
> 
> I would recommend discussing this with the Libtool folks, to see how
> ltdl could adapt to the new situation.  

I recommend that too. - I brought it up a year ago, so if somebody wants to 
give it another take, please feel free to do it. :-)

> But keep in mind that ltdl
> should still do the right thing on those older versions of OS X
> described above.

That might be Mac OS X 10.4 or older; 10.5 and later on PPC cannot run Mac OS 9.

I have a vague memory that a year ago, some still ran Mac OS 10.4.

> Perhaps lt_dlopenext could look for .dylib files if and only if it’s on
> one of these newer OS X versions.  If you can tell Libtool people how
> exactly ltdl can determine whether .dylib can be dlopened or not, then
> you’re all set.

Apparently not.

>> UNIX, and the only parts in the UNIX standard recognizing file name
> 
> “UNIX standard”, what a funny phrase!  :-)

Do you like "Single UNIX Specification" better?