Re: loading functions from a shared library

[Dave Love]

>>>>> Steve Kemp writes:

 > I've managed to find the time to look at this, and it seems like
 >  it would be a fairly simple job to add support for the dynamical
 >  loading of modules.

Yes, that's `well-known', apart from potential problems related to
dumping.  There's a TODO entry.  I don't think it will interact with
the GC conservative stack scanning, but that's worth considering.

 >   I think we could even make it compatable with the XEmacs way of
 >  doing things without too much effort.

As far as I remember, we (Gerd, me and someone else who was looking at
implementing it a year or so ago) agreed it was best to do it using
libtool facilities in the canonical way.  I think that's better than
following what XEmacs does, especially as I seem to remember they had
problems and their facility is little-used.  I was unclear then
whether what Guile and SCM's do was worth looking at -- they have
dynamic loading, and at least used to use unexec facilities borrowed
from Emacs, but it seemed to have gone away in Guile when I last
looked.

[This is one thing which would be substantially easier in a build
framework that used automake and more autoconfiscation, which is the
reason I didn't get round to implementing it.]