[MLton] Library support mostly complete

[Ville Laurikari]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 10:28:57PM +0200, Wesley W. Terpstra wrote:
> I don't have access to solaris / aix / freebsd, so I'm looking for
> volunteers to compile a svn/head MLton and run the script on those
> platforms.

GCC does not implement the visibility options on AIX and complains
loudly when trying to use them.  On AIX, hiding symbols in shared
objects is done at link time by supplying a list of exported symbols
in an "export file" to the linker.  There's also similar "import file"
mechanism to identify the external symbols to resolve at run time.

Luckily, GCC normally uses the system ld (and not GNU ld) on AIX, so
it should be possible to get things to work by using "-Wl,something"
with gcc when linking the shared libs.  MLton would have to generate
export files, and the runtime should also have the export file.
Perhaps the runtime export file could be created automatically with a
hack involving the C preprocessor and a small program or script to
parse it.

There are the additional small problems of "-debug true" being
hardcoded to stabs+ which is not supported on AIX, and an incorrect
shared library suffix.  These are easy.

Note that I will have very limited time to work on this, so it's not
going to get done any time soon (by me at least).

I'll try HP-UX next.

--
http://www.iki.fi/vl/