On Thu, 07 Oct 2004 09:45:19 -0700, Steve Fink wrote: > I've been struggling with getting Darwin to build the dynclasses/ stuff, > and I seem to have it working now. (Oh, and it fixes the Linux build > too.) It's a fairly large change, and I would like to use standard > naming conventions throughout, but I haven't really found any > convincing, definitive source of terminology. > > The issue is that on some platforms, dynamically loadable modules and > shared libraries are different things. Although you may know them under > different names (and one of those names is often used for the other.) > > A dynamically loadable module is something you explicitly load after > startup time, via dlopen() or some similar interface. A shared library > is implicitly loaded at startup time; you can see a list of these under > unix with ldd. > > Under Linux, they both end in a .so extension and are built the same > way. Under Darwin, shared libraries end in .dylib and d-l-modules end in > whatever you want them to. The former is compiled with something like > -dynamiclib and the latter with -bundle (or something; I don't remember > exactly). > > So what I need is names for these. At the moment, I'm mostly using $(SO) > for shared lib extensions, $(DYNMOD) for d-l-modules. The buildflags I > gneerally call $(LD_SHARED) or something with shared for shared libs, > and something like $(LD_DYNMOD_FLAGS) for d-l-modules. > > Clearly, I'm not very experienced with dealing with these things across > platforms, so I was hoping somebody (Andy?) might have a better sense > for what these things are called.
That's actually pretty interesting to me to hear. I sort of hacked a project that relied on dynamically loaded plugin modules to build on OSX, and I ended up using the '-dynamiclib' flag to gcc to produce files that file refers to as "Mach-O dynamically linked shared library ppc" which I then open with dlopen (which is really some sort of magic compatibility wrapper). I always had a certain feeling that I wasn't doing it right, but it worked and I had more important things to fix. -- Jonathan
