[clean-list] Re: Clean and the Open-Source community

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Arjen van Weelden <A.vanWeelden at cs.ru.nl> write:
    ['dynamic linking' means Clean's own type-safe dynamic linker]
    ['dynamic I/O' means I/O of Clean 'dynamic' values]
    [the two go together]

	There is nothing Linux cannot do compared to Windows. (I only wish that 
	Windows could do a Unix-like fork.) Unfortunately:
	The Clean dynamic linker is currently only implemented on Windows.
	Therefore, dynamic I/O and dynamic linking (in the way described above) 
	is only available on Windows. Hence, Famke only runs on Windows.
	
	I hope this answers your questions,

Not really.  The question we're now staring down the barrel of is
"why is the Clean dynamic linker currently only	implemented on Windows?"
What, if any, facility is missing from Linux (or more generally, from the
Single Unix Specification) that prevents this major new feature being
available on, shall we say, less insecure platforms than Windows?

(I still can't get over the fact that back in the 1970s, the Burroughs MCP
provided type-safe static and dynamic linking.  In fact, it didn't provide
any other kind.  I'd say "this isn't rocket science", except that was the
Apollo era, so maybe it was. (:-) (:-)  Oh yeah, and the hardware made
undetected buffer-overrun bugs impossible.  Here we are 30 years later and
GUIs aside it feels like 10 years earlier.)