[Openmcl-devel] How hard would it be...

[Gary Byers]

If that means "package CCL as a sort of shared library that could be
loaded into Firefox's address space", the answer is "probably pretty
difficult."  It wants a few things (in particular NIL) to live at
fixed locations in the address space and it wants to be able to
control what happens when exceptions occur.  (You might be able to
deal with the second issue somehow; if there's already something where
you want NIL (for instance) to be when the library is loaded, you're
pretty much out-of-luck.)

Android applications can be written in any language as long as it's Java.
I did some work several months ago to package CCL as a shared library on
Android and convinced myself that CCL and the Android JVM could stay out
of each other's way.  That doesn't solve the general problem of packaging
CCL as a shared library that could be loaded into arbitrary applications,
but it -might- be true that you could get CCL and Firefox (and other
plugins) to stay out of each other's way.

There are probably some additional issues - a shared library might
need to export standard functionality at the dynamic linker level, and
that'd presumably need to be hooked up to the callback mechanism somehow.

Coming up with a more general shared library solution might sound and
might be desirable, but there are presumably good reasons for some of
the things that make a general solution hard.  (Having NIL live at a
fixed address means that it can be treated as a constant, and there
are good reasons for wanting that.)

On Wed, 31 Aug 2011, Ron Garret wrote:

> ... to package CCL as a Firefox plugin?
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