On Thu, 6 May 2004, Leopold Toetsch wrote:
> Nicholas Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 01:14:21PM +0200, Leopold Toetsch wrote:
>
> >> Good. Do we have currently any platforms that don't support dynamic
> >> loading at all?
>
> > Perl5 builds on UNICOS (Crays), which is a Unix without dynamic linking.
> Is perl5 actually used on Crays? Anyway we might need a config hint to
> turn of dynamic loading stuff.
I don't know about now, but it certainly was at one time. Dean Roehrich
at Cray gave us a great deal of help in porting perl to the Cray (and to
Solaris as well). I would expect that it still is used -- it's a natural
tool to use in such a computing environment.
Off the top of my head, I can think of three instances where building
without dynamic loading is relevant:
1. Some distributors currently build and ship perl5 products that include
a bundled perl binary built without dynamic loading. This is deliberate
to ensure that the product is precisely what the vendor shipped and isn't
loading in other random local stuff. Presumably the same may be true for
perl6.
2. On at least some architectures, adding in PIC code makes the program
run slower, and that might be an issue.
3. Users will try to build parrot on platforms you've never heard of.
Hence there won't be a hint file and you won't necessarily know the
correct dynamic linking invocations. (Configure.pl can try various
guesses, of course, but you can't guarantee one of them will work.) Thus
you need a fall-back plan. The fall-back may be severly limited, but it
would be nice if it weren't a complete failure.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
