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by qppo
2033 days ago
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That's a searing hot take, to be sure. There is no alternative to the C ABI. If you look at stable ABIs in other programming languages, they're either identical to or thin shims around the C ABI! Even COM, with the caveat of calling convention on MSVC. Regardless of ABI stability you also need software to have API stability for stable distribution. The two solutions to this problem are to statically link everything or package your shared objects with your software. Then to launch the software you need a shell script that overrides the loader search path and move on with your life. The ultimate solution is the .app/.bundle paradigm of MacOS. Everything should copy that. The other issues of packaging software like entitlements/capability based security and code signing are similarly orthogonal. If you're shipping big software today, it needs to have everything it needs and to ignore whatever is on the user's system unless they explicitly request an override. The real tragedy of GNU is that the interchangeability of software was always possible, package managers just managed to make it accidental and explicit. Too many foot guns there. |
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> The ultimate solution is the .app/.bundle paradigm of MacOS. Everything should copy that.
All ELF systems support the $ORIGIN RPATH macro. It lets you build and package an application exactly like, if not better than, you would a macOS bundle. Specifically, it let's you specify at compile time a library load path relative to the invoked binary. You'd specify it as $ORIGIN/../lib for the canonical bin/, lib/, etc layout.