Re: [9fans] 8c and elf shared libraries

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:15:26 +0100
"Steve Simon" <steve@quintile.net> wrote:

> Various projects have worked on 8c to make it generate code for other OSs,
> have any of these resulted in code that could generate a very _very_ simple
> ELF shared library sutiable for linux?
>
> -Steve
>

The 8l in Go can produce ELF binaries -- it's the linker rather than
the compiler you want to look at for this. Last I heard, Go's 8l wasn't
compatible with Plan 9's 8c, but there's an 8c in Go so that doesn't
matter too much. I'm sure some Go fans want to use system C libraries
by dynamic linking, but I'm not so sure about producing a linkable
library.

Thinking it over, I'd rather use the regular Linux toolchain for the
task. You can still write sensible C for gcc to compile, and I think
you'll have a lot less work to do. Besides, it's the approach taken by
p9p, inferno, and drawterm, it works well for them. If you're concerned
about compile time just lower the optimisation level or choose a
generic architecture to optimise for.

--
This is obviously some strange usage of the
word "simple" that I was previously unaware of.