Re: [Caml-list] Accelerating compilation

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> On 10/09/13 04:01, oleg@okmij.org wrote:
> 
> > So, the real problem to me is ocamlc using RTLD_NOW flag when loading
> > shared library. Removing the flag would make linking faster, and less
> > painful.
> 
> Sounds reasonable.  I can give it a try later, but if anyone feels
> like experimenting, please share your findings.
> 
> For the record, the intent of this dynamic loading is to check *at
> link-time* that dynamically-loaded stubs provide all the external C
> functions needed by the OCaml bytecode program.  (As opposed to
> failing when the bytecode program is started.)  In other words, to
> detect this problem as early as if one was doing "ocamlc -custom".
> 
> Adrian Nader adds:
> 
> > That completely breaks for cross-compilation. No matter how hard you
> > try, you're going to have troubles loading a PE32 shared library from
> > your ELF executable (and even more if you try to load AArch64 on
> > MIPS).
> 
> Don't worry, it's only for bytecode.  Bytecode executables are already
> portable across platforms, so no special cross-compilation support is
> needed.  For native code, ocamlopt links C stub libraries statically,
> delegating the job to the (cross-)linker.

IIRC the name for unix-related functions are different for Win32, or
maybe that some are missing (non-implemented functions). There was
something that broke building the compiler (I'm really having a hard
time remembering the details though).

It's been months since I last touched that part but in the end it was
workable and anyway, I doubt many people will try to use bytecode for
Windows anyway.

-- 
Adrien Nader