Re: [Foxgui-users] Duplicate libraries in fox-config output

[<je...@fo...>]

On 2024-07-26 07:04, Roland Hughes via Foxgui-users wrote:
> Unknown if it ever impacted FOX, but many years ago, one had to. Gray
> cells are a bit fuzzy on it, had to do with video card flavored
> libraries and a few third party libraries that would not find one
> library if it was linked ahead of it.
> 
> In what could only be an MBA lead "efficiency" move most linkers of
> the day were single pass. While you should never ever under any
> circumstances trust anything on StackOverflow, the answer from this 11
> year old question with a green check mark and 123 up votes does a
> pretty good job of explaining it.
> 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11893996/why-does-the-order-of-l-option-in-gcc-matter
> 
> Thanks to brain dead AI additions to search engines you can no longer
> search for "how many passes does GNU linker make" without getting
> inundated with links to command line passing.
> 
> The comments below that answer tick some memories too. You have to
> remember the x86 has always been and will probably always be the home
> hobby platform. When Intel and Microsoft desperately wanted to get a
> to hold in Fortune 500 data centers they bribed marketing agencies
> like Gartner Group (masquerading as "industry analysts") telling
> companies that systems and libraries needed to conform to "Open
> Standards." Prior to that we had things that actually worked. Your
> OS/400 programs just worked on OS/400. MVS on MVS. VMS on VMS, etc. We
> had screen and other libraries all made by the hardware vendor for the
> hardware and OS we were running on. No, they weren't portable, but
> they "just worked." We used operating systems that were created to be
> robust multi-user platforms that could bill for every byte and clock
> cycle consumed by everyone. It wasn't until MAI, Wang, and a few
> others started going under that portable became something companies
> worried about. We had proprietary security until the vendor went
> under. We also had linkers that operated in one of the following
> manners:
> 
> 1) Made N-passes through the libraries trying to resolve external
> linkage. You had a command line switch to limit the maximum number of
> passes. Something says the default for most was up to 4 passes.
> 
> 2) Loaded _every_ external linkage item from every library on the
> command line into one big lookup table before linking object files.
> (Our libraries had header areas where all this info was so they were
> only reading a few disk blocks from each, not dynamically parsing
> something.)
> 
> 3) Both 1 & 2. Towards the end this was what they all did because
> every time you linked another function from another library it could
> add new external dependencies.
> 
> After the bust-up of AT&T, UNIX, originally created on a DEC PDP,
> which was never created to be a true multi-user OS, just to run phone
> switches and allow maintenance to log in to tweak/update things, got
> popped out into the world of "free software." There might have been as
> many as 60 commercial Unix versions that popped up in the weeks/months
> following. Most of them sucked. None of them were worthy of running a
> business on, though some companies tried. These vendors desperately
> wanted to get into the corporate data center as well. That's where the
> real money was.
> 
> You may remember a name called SUN Microsystems. When you could cobble
> together a generic PC with 40MEG hard drive and two floppies for
> around $800, SUN was selling $20,000 "engineering workstations" to
> corporations that cost about the same to build. They had cash coming
> out their back side and got behind this "standard." There was no way
> they were ever going to get their
> not-really-multi-user-just-multiple-people-could-log-in system into
> the data center unless they could somehow make that sexy to the ones
> with the checkbooks.
> 
> Enter POSIX.
> 
> A standard that busted every proprietary OS trying to conform to it
> because the ones holding the checkbooks demanded compliance with it.
> With POSIX we got insecurities, data breaches, and a mandate for a
> single pass linker because that is all the
> not-really-multi-user-just-multiple-people-could-log-in systems could
> manage.
> 
> Your latest macOS is not POSIX compliant. You should point it out to
> them since Apple was one of the companies behind POSIX back in the
> day. SUN, creators of Java with seemingly limitless financial
> resources, went bankrupt.
> 
> As part of this POSIX world Microsoft wanted to make a standard for
> user interaction. They wanted it to be like their feeble DOS and GUI
> DOS (Windows) was capable of. After the initial POSIX debacle IBM
> flooded the standards committee with employees and customers. That is
> why CUA works exactly like a CICS application on a green screen. We
> tab between fields, have a special ENTER key different from the RETURN
> key, etc.
> 
> Why do those of us who worked on real computers have such disdain for
> the x86 platforms despite all of the embedded, Linux, and desktop
> stuff we have written?
> 
> On the PDP 11/70 we ran 255 interactive/batch users in 64K-words. The
> PC with DOS and 640K bytes could barely run one.
> 
> The current IBM z/OS box, a little shorter and about the same width as
> 2 4-drawer file cabinets can run more users that 2 complete floors of
> machines at any cloud data center in the world. I don't think they
> worried about POSIX compliance.
> 
> Sorry, the "why" behind your answer is tangled up in an ugly corrupt
> history of the PC world. It appears macOS has now learned the ugly
> truth. POSIX was meant to cripple, not enhance.
> 
> When you are written for the least common denominator and all must
> comply, nobody can soar.
> 
> Even GNU has figured this out and quietly hidden their nasty undies  
> --  GNU is no longer POSIX compliant. Read up on:
> 
> --whole-archive      (links everything just like we did with DOS)
> 
> --start-group   --end-group    (make N-passes through these libraries
> trying to resolve linkage)
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/26/2024 2:02 AM, Michael Behrisch via Foxgui-users wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I have a question about the output of "fox-config --libs".
>> On my system it currently gives: "-L/usr/lib64 -lFOX-1.6 -lX11 -lXext 
>> -lfreetype -lfontconfig -lXft -lXcursor -lXrender -lXrandr -lXfixes 
>> -lXi -lGL -lGLU -ldl -lpthread -lrt -ljpeg -lpng -ltiff -lz -lbz2 
>> -lGLU -lGL"
>> which duplicates the GL and GLU libraries.
>> 
>> The problem is that recent macOS builds complain if you link the same 
>> library twice.
>> 
>> I had a look at the source code in configure.ac and fox-config.in and 
>> this seems to be intentional because indeed the GL libraries (LIBGL) 
>> are being added to the LIBS variable and then both are output in the 
>> end.
>> I removed the first addition of the GL libs and it is still working 
>> fine here but before submitting a patch I wanted to ask whether there 
>> is a known reason for this duplication because sometimes the linker is 
>> tricky.
>> 
>> Thank you and best regards,
>> Michael


W.r.t. search engines, Google, Bing are no longer search engines.  You
won't find anything with these.

I recommend xmol, presearch, and yandex.

===

Yes, it is indeed sometimes necessary to repeat same library, because 
sometimes stuff was not possible to be arranged so all references were 
forward.

However, it is possible current linkers are no longer having this 
problem;
maybe it was a a.out limitation, or maybe it only applies to .a linkage
and .so links [which are resolved at runtime] do not have this 
problem...


   -- JVZ



  -- JVZ