I understand that making the Dynlibs themselves binary compatible would be unsolvable given the fragmentation of the targets, but I wonder if there isn't the possibility of an intermediary solution.

Assuming that the required libraries existed on the target system, the information needed for the perl runtime to invoke them could be embedded in a system specific library. 'scuse me if the following descriptions are somewhat clumsy or dumbed down, but I found it difficult to describe in generic terms.

For a stand-alone Perl app to invoke a DynLib routine it needs, and has available to it, essentially 4 pieces of information.

• The name of the library
• The name of the routines
• The order, types and values of the parameters to pass.
• The order and types of values to be returned.

The information missing at this level are

• The locations of the libraries
• The calling conventions of the library routines (C, Fortran, other).
• The byte ordering of the parameters and return values.

It seems to me that you could have a piece of interface code that accepted the information that the interpreter knows in the (a) standard format and massaged them in a locally specific manner in order to call the DynLib and then retrieve the return(s) and pass them back to the interpreter. This piece of code could be pretty small and made available and a public library of binary versions for most systems could then be added to cpan or elsewhere and wouldn't take a lot of space. This would be a part of the same archive as the binary runtime interpreters.

This would still require local libraries to be built for any given target system by the owner/operators of that system, but should give enough isolation from local specifics to allow genericity of distributable binary applications?

---

Okay you lot, get your wings on the left, halos on the right. It's one size fits all, and "No!", you can't have a different color.
Pick up your cloud down the end and "Yes" if you get allocated a grey one they are a bit damp under foot, but someone has to get them.
Get used to the wings fast cos its an 8 hour day...unless the Govenor calls for a cyclone or hurricane, in which case 16 hour shifts are mandatory.
Just be grateful that you arrived just as the tornado season finished. Them buggers are real work.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.