Shared libraries

Marcus J. Ranum mjr at hussar.dco.dec.com
Mon Apr 29 13:13:51 AEST 1991


John F Haugh II writes about UNIX:

>The intention was to be simple and elegant, not spartan.

	I couldn't pass this up. The Spartans, in fact, were successful
because they did live a simple, elegant, ummm, spartan existence. It was
their success, and the ensuing "fat dumb & happy" way of life that resulted
from their success that did 'em in. There's an obvious witty remark about
"those that do not study history..." I suppose I could make here.

> The solution
>to the shared library dilema is to find a simple and elegant implementation
>of shared libraries.

	I somewhat disagree. The trick is to take a step back - forget
the bloody shared libraries and develop a system with a decent virtual
memory system that allows nice shared memory, memory mapping, and copy
on write type semantics for those pesky data areas, and shared libraries
are less of a problem. If you look at your watermelon/kernel and ask
"how can I add shared libraries" you'll wind up with a kludge.

mjr.



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