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

[Martijn Vervoort]

On Thursday 27 January 2005 11:42, Ronny Wichers Schreur wrote:
> Richard A. O'Keefe writes (to the Clean discussion list):
> > 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?
>
> It's not Linux that's missing something, but nobody (inside or outside
> Nijmegen) has felt the urge to implement dynamic linking on that
> platform. I believe that the ELF loader provides enough hooks to make
> it easier than the current implementation under Windows.

The dynamic linker, written in Clean, is more than just a linker. It is 
actually an extension of the Clean run-time system to manage dynamics. A 
relatively small part of the Clean code does the actual loading and linking 
of code. It is certainly possible to replace it with an Linux equivalent. 
Using Clean's C-interface, it should be possible to even re-use existing 
open-source code.

The other low-level part of the dynamic run-time system resides in the 
application itself: the decoding/encoding of the Clean's internal graph. It 
is written in x86-assembler. Should not be too much of a problem to port it 
to x86-Linux. For other linuxes, it should be re-written. Part of the rewrite 
could be done in Clean and the rest in ABC-code or assembler.

For the interested, there is paper about dynamic I/O available from the Clean 
site.

Martijn Vervoort
(former developer dynamics)