Re: as for Calc and the math library

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Nicolas Martyanoff <nicolas@n16f.net>
> Cc: arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>,  nicolas@n16f.net,
>   emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:10:28 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > AFAIU, there should be no reasons not to be able to load MIT licensed
> > libraries via the emacs-module machinery.
> 
> IIRC the reason I abandoned was that you can load a dynamic module but
> there is no mechanism to reload it once modified, meaning one cannot
> develop packages with dynamic modules iteratively.

This is a technical problem with loading shared libraries, so it will
also happen with FFI, AFAIU.

In general, unloading and reloading doesn't work in Emacs well even in
Lisp, less so with native-compiled Lisp.  Not sure this can be
improved and how, but it would be a welcome addition and enhancement.

> There is also nothing in place to facilitate building these dynamic
> modules as part of an Emacs package, and it is not that simple: locate C
> files distributed with the package, build the library with the right
> flags depending on the current platform, cache it in a place that makes
> sense…

That again is mostly common with any solution based on loading shared
libraries.  We have elaborate documentation of then interfaces for
writing and using dynamic modules, but of course if someone will
submit some boilerplate code to ease this, or come up with automation
of some of this, I'm sure that would be welcome.