Re: solib: URL patch

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at mckinlay dot net dot nz>]

On Thursday, Aug 14, 2003, at 06:10 Pacific/Auckland, Jeff Sturm wrote:

> On 13 Aug 2003, Tom Tromey wrote:
> > Too bad there's no way to hook into ld.so's symbol lookup and replace
> > it with our own...
>
> Yes indeed.  That is the crux of the problem I think, that gcj has 
> relied
> on ELF (ld.so) linking semantics since day one, which are inadequate to
> completely implement loading of classes in native code.
>
> Extending ld.so isn't out of the question for GNU-ish systems, but 
> there
> are far too many important proprietary targets (Windows) to make it
> worthwhile.

Yeah. I've thought about that, and I seem to remember Per talking about 
it in the past. But at this point the benefits of having Java-aware 
linking done in ld.so rather than by libgcj are unlikely to be worth 
the complexity/effort. I guess that you could optimize things by having 
the Java linker aware of the GOT and PLT etc, but considering that 
virtual calls with --indirect-dispatch are already faster than private 
calls I dunno if there'd be much to gain.

Regards

Bryce.