dynamic loading of extensions

From: Harvey J. Stein <hjstein_at_math.huji.ac.il>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 21:26:54 +0200

While cleaning out my mailbox, I ran across an inquiry of yours:

Sarah Officer writes:
> I used dynamic loading to extend STk on a SUN4 OS, and it worked great.
> Now I am wondering when this dynamic loading feature will be supported
> on other platforms, such as Linux. Is there a schedule? Will dynamic
> loading be available on Linux? What does it take to implement dynamic
> loading?

I'd like the same thing (or at least *some* method so as to avoid
having to wait while all my code is loaded each time I start up an STk
application). So, I looked at the load/dump code.

I don't really understand these sorts of things, but it seems to me
that STk is basically doing a core-dump of its working memory into a
relocatable object file which can then be dynamically linked in with
the dlopen system call. It's my impression that doing such things is
very easy with ELF binaries & dynamic libraries, and very difficult
with Linux binaries & dynamic libaries.

You might try installing the ELF gcc & libraries & making an ELF STk
to get this to work. However, I'm not sure that dlopen has been
implemented yet, so this might not work either.

Good luck,

Dr. Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
hjstein_at_math.huji.ac.il
Received on Mon Dec 12 1994 - 20:40:43 CET