On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 03:14:55PM -0500, Wietse Venema wrote:
> Victor Duchovni:
> > On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 01:43:35PM -0500, Wietse Venema wrote:
> >
> > > Victor Duchovni:
> > > > Table drivers may depend on internal library interfaces that a
> > > > particular
> > > > application does not directly depend on, and so a statically linked
> > > > executable may not contain all the pre-requisite entry-points.
> > >
> > > The plug-in would not know how to call them anyway.
>
> Call them that statically-linked program, that is.
Right, the program does not know how to call the missing functions,
and when using ".a" files, they may be missing from the binary, so a
plug-in won't find them. If however, the plugin is dynamically linked
against libglobal and libutil, it will have access to entry-points that
the loading binary does not include.
The point of all this, is that dynamic linking is primarily needed
to implement dynamic loading. If we do intend to do dynamic loading,
dynamic linking is not compelling. Without dynamic linking, dynamic
loading is difficult.
--
Viktor.
