Can it compile to a dll/so?

[Zireael07]

Title.

[titzer]

Currently no. The Virgil compiler always produces a statically linked executable. Would your use case need linking a .so?

[Zireael07]

Yes (it's for a preexisting game engine that can use external dll's for scripting languages support. No hurry though, as I don't expect their docs/API to be finalized in a couple months from now

[titzer]

I don't have the bandwidth on that atm, but off the top of my head, it would require emitting an additional section for the dynamic linker and some internal compiler work to deal with addresses that aren't fixed.

[crystalthoughts]

If I'm not mistaken (I'm not yet really a systems coder), this would allow for development of numerical libraries in virgil, that could be called by other code (e.g a GUI) written in another language? If so this could help boost adoption quite a bit if it was advertised that way. I've spent a lot of time looking into ways of avoiding C++ :)

[titzer]

I've spent a lot of time looking into ways of avoiding C++ :)

Heh, yes. Well you have come to the right place to avoid the C world :-)

I could use some help on making linkable .so files. As I mentioned above, it'd require emitting another section in the ELF file, potentially making it position-independent, and adding symbols. Currently, symbols are supported, but maybe an additional name mangling step to work.