Fragile ABI

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-08-17 14:00:42 +0000, "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> said:

> On Friday, 17 August 2012 at 13:42:27 UTC, Michel Fortin wrote:
>> On 2012-08-17 12:36:56 +0000, "R Grocott" [..] (Windows does not really 
>> have a dynamic linker).
> 
> Why? What is it lacking?
> 
>  From my experience, I don't have much to complain about it.
> 
> Just wanting to know, not trolling.

Quote from <http://xenophilia.org/winvunix.html>:

> In Unix, a shared object (.so) file contains code to be used by the 
> program, and also the names of functions and data that it expects to 
> find in the program. When the file is joined to the program, all 
> references to those functions and data in the file's code are changed 
> to point to the actual locations in the program where the functions and 
> data are placed in memory. This is basically a link operation.
> In Windows, a dynamic-link library (.dll) file has no dangling 
> references. Instead, an access to functions or data goes through a 
> lookup table. So the DLL code does not have to be fixed up at runtime 
> to refer to the program's memory; instead, the code already uses the 
> DLL's lookup table, and the lookup table is modified at runtime to 
> point to the functions and data.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/