Re: [Caml-list] OCaml version 3.11.0+beta1

[Andres Varon <avaron@gmail.com>]

On Oct 15, 2008, at 12:03 PM, Xavier Leroy wrote:

>>> Native dynlink used to work on Mac OS X < 10.5 (x86 only). The new
>>> linker in 10.5 does not support linking shared libraries with non- 
>>> PIC
>>> code. It is still possible to use the old linker, called ld_classic,
>>> but some libraries (like X11) does not work, so this has been  
>>> disabled
>>> in the configure script.
>>>
>>> The clean solution to make natdynlink work on recent Mac OS X  
>>> systems
>>> (beside convincing Apple to support the old behavior of their linker
>>> in their new implementation) is to change OCaml's x86 backend so  
>>> that
>>> it produces only PIC code (this has been done for the AMD64 port). I
>>> don't think there is currently any plan to work on that.
>>
>> Ouch, this makes it almost a dead end for us. I can offer some time  
>> to
>> help in this effort, working in the port, or providing feedback. The
>> native dynlink and toplevel are, at least to me, the killer  
>> features in
>> 3.11, but adding another hole for Mac OS X intel (in addition to not
>> supporting x86_64) does not seem like the best choice for an
>> increasingly popular architecture.
>
> Well, we'd very much like to support native dynlink on OS X 10.5,
> but Apple is not helping in the least by crippling their linker
> compared with the one in 10.4.  If anyone from Apple is on this list,
> feel free to contact us at caml-devel@yquem.inria.fr for more
> information on this regression.

I'm glad to report that I just tried with XCode 3.1.1 and the linker  
did not complain (as it did with XCode 3.0). I wrote a little test and  
the native Dynlink worked with that version of XCode  (using 10.5.5,  
Intel -- I had to drop an -I flag in the linker call from the OCaml  
compiler when I was trying it).

Andres

>
>
> - Xavier Leroy
>