Re: Mac OS X .dylib not working

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

[Is Hans on one of these lists now?  His original message to bug-guile said not and asked to be cc'ed.]

On Feb 2, 2010, at 13:01, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> The Guile manually specifically tells that FNAME should not contain an
> extension.

That could be unfortunate, since it means that unlike other Mac applications, a Guile application would not be able to customize its plugin names to use Foo.quuxplugin type names.  Guile apps would be limited to a hardcoded set of suffixes then, right?

> Surprisingly, I just noticed that Guile itself doesn’t use the ‘-module’
> option of Libtool when creating its ‘libguile-srfi-srfi-1’ module (which
> is meant to be dlopened *or* directly linked against), although this has
> never caused any problems on OS X.  If you search for that in [1],
> ‘libguile-srfi-srfi-1’ is actually created with ‘-dynamiclib’.

Current versions of Mac OS X can load shared libraries (.dylib) as well as the bundle format that seems to have been the original plugin form (.so, .bundle, ...).  So in practice, assuming you can dlopen and dlclose a shared library works pretty well, though I gather it might not have worked as well in earlier releases.  But we should also support the format(s) intended for plugin modules as well, and the naming conventions (which appear to be somewhat varied, and less consistent than on other OSes).

At least, that's my impression; I'm not an expert in that area of the OS, I've just read some of the docs...

Ken