Re: Linking to libraries in the ELF?

[Andy Wingo]

On Fri 29 Jan 2021 17:20, Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> writes:

> I've got this crazy idea a few days ago, about the FFI interface.
> When a program written in C is compiled with some shared libraries,
> these libraries are referred to in special [insert ELF terminology
> here] of the binary.  I wonder if it would be reasonable and feasible
> to do something similar for compiles guile modules?

These sections of executables or shared libraries are actually
*interpreted* by the system dynamic library loader, ld.so.  Guile has
its own loader, independent of ld.so, and so can implement this -- or do
more flexible things.  In any case we probably shouldn't tie ourselves
to the particular implementation of a particular loader.

Of course, dynamic-link was... not a great interface.  But with the
recent changes in git I think it can be fine (see "Foreign Libraries" in
the manual).  For the FFI the bigger problem IMO is generating faster
foreign procedure bindings -- i.e. farther on the
compilation-vs-interpretation scale.

Cheers,

Andy