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An Ode to the Linker

I’m no poet, but…

The Solaris linker is one of my favorite parts of Solaris. Long before coming to Sun I acquainted myself with the excellent Linker and Libraries Guide at docs.sun.com and used various linker tricks for fun and profit.

I see the linker as a set of extensions to the C language:

The control over the namespace afforded by object grouping amounts to a form of packages, in the Lisp or Perl5 sense.
The dlopen(3C) family of functions provides for run-time extensibility.
Symbol interposition provides a rudimentary form of “around methods,” if you’ll allow the abuse of terminology.
Filters provide a facility for coping with moves of interfaces from one object to another, and more.
Map files, together with header files, provide more control over the definition of an object’s ABI than just the headers alone.

Developers would be well advised to read the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide, as well as Rod Evan’s and Michael Walker’s blogs.

~ by nico on June 10, 2005.

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