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From: ericco@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (Eric C. Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: MiNT: first things first
Message-ID: <1990Sep27.170514.19506@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 27 Sep 90 17:05:14 GMT
References: <1990Sep25.175226.6410@doe.utoronto.ca> <1990Sep26.220620.27988@math.lsa.umich.edu>
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In article <1990Sep26.220620.27988@math.lsa.umich.edu> hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) writes:
>In article <1990Sep25.175226.6410@doe.utoronto.ca> david@doe.utoronto.ca (David Megginson) writes:
>>Maybe what we need most of all for MiNT is a reasonably good
>>clone of the Unix system library for Gnu. If someone rewrites
>>gnu.olb to recognise and use MiNT, porting programs will be
>>a cinch. Perhaps CRT0 should check whether MiNT is present,
>>and set a global variable _mint to TRUE or FALSE (and do the
>>same for _rtx, of course). Then the library can use these 
>>variables to decide how to execute system functions.
>
>Sounds like a very good idea. Actually, how 'bout creating an
>array of function pointers and letting crt0 initialize it to the
>appropriate calls... That would prevent wasting time testing
>variables all the time...

Shared libraries would handle this quite neatly.  The basic concept is to
edit the programs runtime binding so that function calls are made directly
to the library functions (ie, without indirection or table lookup).

Another possibility is a GNUware program I got off the net, called
dld, a dynamic loader.

Eric

Eric
ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu