Fundamental defect of the concept of shared libraries

[Michael Meissner]

In article <8029 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
writes:

| >As I already said, PIC (Position Independent Code) imposes several
| >restrictions to hardware, which many architectures can't obey.
| 
| Which architectures?  SPARC obviously isn't one of them, and HP-PA
| isn't, either, as the HP folks also did their shared libraries on Series
| 800 machines.  So far, MIPS R-series doesn't seem to be one, either; its
| branch instructions are position-independent, and it can do an
| unconditional "branch to subroutine", so it can get the PC of the
| beginning of the routine into a register with position-independent code.
| The Motorola 88K isn't one, either; check out the System V Release 4 ABI
| for the 88K.

The MIPS branch instructions are PC-relative, but are limited to +/-
128K range.  This obviously might cause problems with some fortran
applications.....
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

You are in a twisty little passage of standards, all conflicting.