On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 17:36 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > >> So my main question is "where to from here?" > > > > I think, if the ocaml compiler doesn't support dynamic libraries, static > > linking would be acceptable. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't press > > upstream to add dynamic linking (and convert all our packages when that > > becomes available) just an acknowledgment that fixing the limitation has > > to be done upstream (it could be done by someone within Fedora but the > > fix needs to go upstream). Yes, I'm inclined to agree. I do find that the lack of debugging information is a problem though -- I'm trying to chase a SEGV in freetennis on ppc64 and I can't even tell which function it's in. > > This is similar to allowing C libraries in even if they only build > > statically. > > > > If I'm not understanding precisely what the limitation is, feel free to > > clarify. > > There are two issues here: (a) Having OCaml binaries link dynamically > instead of statically to OCaml libraries. (b) Writing a dynamic library > in OCaml, and having it used by programs written in other languages, > particularly C. > > I suspect it's unlikely that upstream will do (a), ever. There's a > technical issue. OCaml really doesn't have a concept of an ABI. It > does a kind of whole-program optimisation where even changes to the > internal implementation of a library can affect the resulting binary. > Moreover even if you "fixed" that, any change whatsoever to the > library's signature or the version of compiler it was built with (even > bugfix releases which have the same version number) will make the > library incompatible. Our current package scheme doesn't handle this at all, does it? Should our ocaml-*-devel packages have runtime Requires: on the precise n-v-r of ocaml used to build them? > As for (b), the ability to write libraries in a sane language and have > them called through a C API: This almost works. Well, it works well on > i386, but there are some problems on x86-64. Er, some of the core ocaml runtime is written in C. If you don't have calls to the C API working, you can't spit out native code at all. Or do you mean something special for _dynamic_ libraries... which shouldn't really be anything special. I was just about to hack the ppc64 output to generate dynamic libraries just to make debugging treetennis easier... -- dwmw2 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
