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From: wollman@emily.uvm.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: dynamic loaders
Message-ID: <1991Apr28.210003.3821@uvm.edu>
Date: 28 Apr 91 21:00:03 GMT
References: <14530@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <12532@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <12573@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
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Organization: University of Vermont - EMBA Computing Facility
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In article <12573@dog.ee.lbl.gov> torek@elf.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:
>Note that although the subject asked for a dynamic loader (which can
>be implemented in machine-dependent C), but the body of the article
>also asked for, in essense, some way to define `in advance' all of
>the possible function call protocols.  This also can be implemented in
>machine-dependent C, but it then becomes compiler-dependent as well.

There already exist several bits&pieces of code to do dynamic loading.
There is the GNU dld library, which runs on Suns and a few others;
several operating systems (such as SunOS 4.1 and Umax 4.3, to name
two) have built-in support for it; if you can stomach the
object-oriented preprocessor called `class' and the fact that it takes
up 80 Meg on a Sparc, there is also CMU's Andrew system, which
supports Vaxen, MIPSEL, Sparcs, Sun-3s, HPs of some vintage, and
Mach-i386 (to name a few).  The only problem with the latter is the
size and terms of distribution may not be amenable to everyone, and it
doesn't yet work on SunOS 4.1.

-GAWollman


Garrett A. Wollman - wollman@emily.uvm.edu

Disclaimer:  I'm not even sure this represents *my* opinion, never
mind UVM's, EMBA's, EMBA-CF's, or indeed anyone else's.