[Vm-dev] Stupidifying FFI/library loading mechanism

[Andreas Raab]

On 5/27/2011 13:01, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> On 27 May 2011 12:52, Andreas Raab<andreas.raab at gmx.de>  wrote:
>> Then perhaps you can clarify what you mean by "I think we should trash too
>> clever intrinsic library lookup mechanism and provide a simple primitive,
>> which attempts to load a library by given file name&  path ". To me, this
>> sounded as if you want to deliberately abandon implicit search paths on the
>> platforms. If not, then I don't understand what is different compared with
>> today (other than having better failure information with which I agree).
> Clarification:
> if search is implicitly managed by platform, then there's no problem.
> (and actually you cannot trash this logic since it sits in platform
> functions, and VM have to use these functions anyway).
> But VM should not add its own implicit logic in addition to what
> provided by platform.

It seems to me that a good way to address the implicit logic is simply 
by by exposing (a list of) search paths to the image. In which case you 
can set the search paths to be as wide, or as narrow, as you'd like and 
the VM can list what additional search paths it would use by default, 
thus making this both forwards and backwards compatible.

Cheers,
   - Andreas