[fpc-devel] OS aware RTL proposal

[Marco van de Voort]

> Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
> >We don't. 
> >We just make the interface available, that's it. 
> >It shouldn't be used by default in libfprtl.
> >
> >Michael.
> >  
> What about Lazarus/binary packages? I think libfprtl.so is required there.
> If you use syscall version of this lib it's ok. If you use FPC_USE_LIBC 
> however, it will cause linking problems on older distroes for example. I 
> wonder how do you plan to fix this little problem.

I dropped a hint in an earlier mail, but the linker guru's didn't respond to
that, so I looked it up:

To my knowledge there is something like lazy evaluation, iow symbols are not
resolved until they are used (http://www.iecc.com/linker/linker10.html ,
search for lazy ). So it might be just setting some bits on the symbol in
the linker.

IOW a manual solution is not 100% necessary.

> There's also the "oldselect" problem for example. Might seem like a 
> triviality but select() is used for many things (sleep, file IO etc.) 
> which might mean FPC binaries would be much slower on 2.6 for example.

These things are only temporary. For BSD I sometimes put stuff like this
under "FREEBSD5" directive, so that i can simply tell people that run into
these problems to recompile their compiler using that directive.

For Linux this is a bit harder though, due to separate versioning of all
components.