[fpc-pascal] The new Delphi 2010 RTTI

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be said:
> >> work as packages are intended to work.
> >
> > Could you explain this?
> 
> A Delphi DLL on windows is roughly equivalent to a exe.
> A fully contained binary, no dependencies.

DLL's can perfectly fine depend on other binaries.

I assume you mean linker namespaces here.
 
> We currently 'emulate' this on linux, in that we stuff the whole rtl and
> whatnot in the library if one is created.

You can also emulate it the other way around by having Windows DLLs export
all symbols.

> However, normally, on linux, libraries are a means of spreading code over 
> several libraries, i.e. if you create a library, you don't put libc in it,
> you link to libc. This concept is closer to packages.

Systems with linker namespaces allow you to avoid painful problems with
duplicate symbols in complex linking situations.  These don't happen as
quickly in Linux because everything is centrally organized from the
distribution (at the price of fragmentation, versioning and the missing of a
long time stable binary abi)

But IMHO neither has anything to do with packages.