Interesting linker 'extension' from Firefox folk

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Mar 1 18:25:02 UTC 2012


The Firefox folks have done an interesting thing with library linkages...
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2436

See code:
    https://github.com/glandium/faulty.lib

Notion is that library code that doesn't *actually* get referenced
shouldn't necessarily need to get drawn into memory immediately, or
perhaps even ever.  Evidently Firefox has quite a lot of code of that
sort.  I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for LibreOffice,
KDE, GNOME...

They built a linker (valid for Linux and Android) which puts libraries
into a compressed form that may be accessed in "slices", so that only
those slices that actually get referenced get uncompressed and loaded
into memory.  Smells a bit like the Multics notion of "library
faults".

The latter was more powerful; it would allow suspending the code, and
you could conceivably stop, implement the code that would support
whatever function was requested, and then let the application
continue, running against code that perhaps hadn't yet been
implemented when you started up the application.  That's not an
approach that's anywhere near being called "friendly" to
non-programmers, but could certainly be interesting during development
of an application.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list