Re: Help- selective symbol exposure after link

Paul David Fox <pfox@lehman.com> writes:


> Why oh why do the compiler people ignore the linker?


It's a "common problem": the linker doesn't belong to any one language
in particular; most people seem to think it's part of the OS. So
nobody really cares. Also, I'd guess that during development, only the
needs of the languages in wide use (COBOL, FORTRAN, C, assembler) are
catered to; when time comes to add support for such exotics as Ada or
even C++, the thing turns into such a mess nobody wants to touch it.


Even in VMS, the linker was one of worst and buggiest pieces of code,
with fixes or changes only done when absolutely required, and some
truly ugly hacks being hidden by non-documentation. When VMS was
ported to the Alphas, one of the few things that was completely
re-written, with some necessary design changes (e.g., to better
support the generation of shared images, which is what VMS calls
Unix's shared libraries) thrown in, was the linker.


Jan
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