Re: ld as a functor

* Matthew Fluet:

> On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 2:48 PM, Florian Weimer <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Sorry, this is a bit off-topic, and is perhaps a long shot.
>>
>> At work, something came up which made me think of a paper I might have
>> read some time ago (or let's say, what I'm doing is inspired by it):
>> it's about ld (the UNIX link editor/static linker) as an ML functor.
>> But I can't find an online reference to it.  Does anybody know if
>> something like this ever existed?
>>
>> The historical development may have gone in the opposite direction;
>> functors as a way to do type-safe later binding, and that could have
>> been based on the experiences with UNIX-style link editors.
>
> It is certainly common to refer to ML functors as a "linking"
> mechanism, especially when comparing with other kinds of grouping
> mechanisms (e.g., units) or advanced features (e.g., recursive
> modules).
>
> Bob Harper and Benjamin Pierce write (in "Design Considerations for
> ML-Style Module Systems" from "Advanced Topics in Types and
> Programming Languages):

Wow, thanks, that must be the reference I was looking for.  I own the
book, but didn't remember that I had browsed it to the degree that I
would remember that passage.

Ultimately, I'm trying to get some inspiration and terminology from ML
module systems for problems surrounding various variants of dlopen and
dlmopen, which also boils down to state sharing between multiple
instances of what is considered the same DSO according to some varying
set of criteria.  We occasionally get requests for implementing
different behaviors and extensions (and even patches), but without a
clear description how various corner cases are supposed to behave.
Even my fairly limited exposure to ML module systems led me to believe
that this is not a trivial problem at all, but so far, it has been
very difficult to convey this.

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