SunOS vs. Ultrix comparison

[Rod Stephens]

In article <8012 at castle.ed.ac.uk> yfcw14 at castle.ed.ac.uk (K P Donnelly) writes:
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>e.g. I have heard that SunOS has "shareable libraries".  I am not sure
>what these are, but they sound very like the dynamic linking of object
>files at load time which Edinburgh University's EMAS operating system
>(now disappearing) has had for over ten years, and the lack of which I
>find intensely frustrating as I try to move our program libraries to
>Unix.  Makefiles are a very poor substitute.  Can anyone tell me whether
>SunOS shareable libraries are really that good, or whether Ultrix is
>likely to aquire anything similar.

Shareable libraries mean 2 applications using the same library
functions can share the same image of the library and do not need to
include the library in their executables. This is REALLY nice for X
windows where a "hello_world" program takes about a megabyte -- mostly
X library code. "Dynamic linking" (late binding) is a seperate but
related issue.

DEC says Ultrix will be OSF/1-based around the end of 1991 and OSF/1
specifies shareable libraries and late binding. DEC will probably
implement them in Ultrix.

>Another thing which I find frustrating as we try to move to Unix is the
>way that many utilities strip the eighth bit at every opportunity.  Does
>Ultrix have better 8-bit character set support, perhaps carried over
>from the DEC multinational character set on VMS?
>
>   Kevin Donnelly

OSF/1 also apecifies "8-bit clean" functions which means functions are
not allowed to strip off the 8th bit.

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Rod Stephens           | "Haven't I told you not to play      |
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