Re: Dynamic loading progress

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 07:58:12 -0800
> From: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> 1) Shared libraries traditionally expose stable ABIs; when ABIs change
> incompatibly, libraries change sonames. Shared libraries need stable
> ABIs whether or not Emacs loads them: they're linked into other programs
> and aren't necessarily rebuilt at the same time as their dependencies.
> The Emacs core has never had a stable ABI, and creating one would
> constrain our optimization opportunities.
> 
> (That is, libpng.so's ABI ought to change a lot less often than
> /usr/bin/emacs's: the former promises to provide a stable ABI and the
> latter never has.)

Sorry, I don't share your optimism about the stability of their ABI.
In particular, image libraries are a bad example on which to build
your point: look at the versonitis we need to employ in w32-win.el to
support all their different ABIs.  Each new revision there breaks
Emacs build with them.

And we didn't yet start talking about problems with passing FILE
pointers and malloc'ed buffers between Emacs and the modules.