Re^2: static linking demanded

[bkchapin]

What I've heard is SCO does not have libdl or some equivalent. So, no dlopen library function. SCO still has some sort of dynamic linking, just not that kind.

Took me a moment to understand that dirty trick with the library directory, and yeah, that's pretty cool, sneaky, and dirty. The crucial point is that the length of the directory name is kept the same by padding the front of the name with the correct number of '/' characters. Sort of the NOP of directory names.

[sgt]

A dirty hack for sure. On cygwin and possibly others you might have to use /. instead of // as // might indicate some network share. Devious things can even be done to defeat checksum schemes.

Dynamic linking is really when you can load at runtime a shared library; this is what perl needs for "use ...;". What is given by a "dynamic linker" like dld (/usr/lib/dlds.so for example) and the such is actually pretty static. The terminology varies a lot with the O.S. True dynamic linking is when a program can use the same API as the "dynamic linker". In perl code the true dynamic nature of a dlopen-like API means you can "use" to load and "no" to unload; this can be useful if you need to maintain a low memory consumption profile (using "use" and "no" as many times as necessary). Note that a process will not give back to the O.S the memory once taken but it can certainly reuse.

cheers --stephan