Re: weak symbols on Cygwin

["Yaakov (Cygwin/X)" <yselkowitz at users dot sourceforge dot net>]

On 2010-04-07 04:06, Bruno Haible wrote:
> I was implicitly hoping that
>    - gcc would collect all weak-declared symbols in some table, and
>      generate code so that the reference to these symbols makes an indirection
>      through this table,
>    - the Cygwin runtime would call dlsym or GetProcAddress at startup and
>      fill in addresses into said table.

This is essentially what FlexDLL[1] does, as used by OCaml to support 
shared stublibs and natdynlink modules on PE platforms.  The major 
drawback to FlexDLL (besides being nearly impossible to understand 
because most of it is written in OCaml :-)) is that all link commands 
must be passed through its flexlink command.

I suppose a possible solution would be to port flexlink to C as part of 
gcc (or ld?) and merge the flexdll_*() functionality into Cygwin.  That 
would be way beyond me, however; I barely managed to learn enough about 
OCaml to add some patches[2] necessary for a Cygwin-native flexdll 
package for Ports.

[1] http://alain.frisch.fr/flexdll.html
[2] 
http://cygwin-ports.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cygwin-ports/ports/trunk/devel/flexdll/


Yaakov
Cygwin Ports

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