Re: static linking and dlopen

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Sun, Dec 09, 2012 at 08:07:53PM +0100, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> * Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> [2012-12-09 12:54:52 -0500]:
> > just links everything together the right way. It's not clear to me
> > whether this would be easy to change; it's possible that, due to
> > always using dynamic linking internally, a number of dependencies on
> > dynamic-linking-related behavior (symbol interposition, accessing
> > things via dlsym, etc.) crept into the code, and would be painful to
> > exorcise (especially under the constraint of not breaking their
> > dynamic builds).
> 
> i guess it's hard to fix (legacy from netscape 2.0)
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference/Plug-in_Basics
> 
> this plugin system is a core part of dom
> and uses the nspr (netscape portable runtime)
> to do the dlopen/dlclose/dlsym

Yes, but being that it's abstracted by nspr, it could be replaced with
a system to use internal 'plugins'. Anyway I was less concerned with
features that are based on dynamic loading (plugins) and more
interested in the problem that the whole core browser is made up of
tons of shared libraries that are always-loaded (whether by dlopen or
at startup-time, I'm not sure..)

Rich