Re: [Chicken-users] sqlite3 egg on cygwin

[Thomas Chust]

On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, felixwinkelmann wrote:

> On 2/1/06, Thomas Chust <address@hidden> wrote:
> > just removing the -o argument in the csc statement will break the
> > following install-extension statement, which relies on the output being
> > called .so
>
> In fact, install-extension handles this automatically.

Hello,

oh, I didn't know about that compatibility hack, yet.

> > Before I make similar changes to my other eggs, though, I would still very
> > much like to have an answer to these questions. Why does CHICKEN load from
> > .so files on every system except Windows but requires .dll on Windows? In
> > my opinion you should either stick to the .so extension on every platform
> > or use the native extension on every platform, not mix these concepts.
>
> Windows wants them to be named .dll, so I think we already do the latter
> (use the native extension). Am I missing something?
> [...]

Well, the native extension is used on Linux and Windows apparently, but 
there are just as many different file extensions for shared libraries in 
the *nix world as there are different concepts and file formats for them. 
There is .dylib on MacOS X and Darwin, and on some other systems (but I 
don't remember which belonged to which) I also saw .shlib, .sl, .shl and 
you name it. I just never encountered a system so far that was too stupid 
to load code from a file with arbitrary extension, if you explicitly told 
it to do so.

Therefore I would have considered it much cleaner to give the CHICKEN 
dynamically loadable code fragments the same extension everywhere. But if 
Windows needs an extra treatment once more, because it can only load from 
.dll files, you can't help it -- except maybe calling the files .dll 
everywhere ;)


cu,
Thomas