On 11/04/2017 8:08 AM, Suliman wrote:
On Friday, 7 April 2017 at 07:15:44 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
I'm going to give you a very bad but still a good place to begin with
explanation.
So, what is an executable? Well in modern operating systems that is a
file with a very complex structure inside, like PE-COFF or ELF. It has
a bunch of things as part of this, a dynamic relocation table,
sections and symbols.
Now, there is a very important symbol it provides a "main" function.
Normally the libc takes ownership of this and then on calls to the
c-main that we all know and love (druntime uses this and then passes
it to another symbol called _Dmain).
What is the difference between a shared library and an executable?
Well not much, no main function for starters (although Win32 based
ones do have something like it in its place) and a couple of
attributes stored in the file.
Executables like shared libraries are final binaries, they cannot be
further linked with, at least with the most common formats + linkers
anyway.
You asked about the difference between a static library and a shared
library, it isn't quite the right comparison. You should be asking
about static libraries versus object files. In essence a static
library is just a group of object files. Not too complicated.
Ok, but what about Go? I have heard that it's compile all code to single
exe? What is the way it's done there?
I can't quote what Go has for a runtime (and if it does the _Dmain
trick) but over all, since it is a native language everything I have
said should be valid.
I just checked[0] it is all completely valid, Go forces you to jump
through hoops to do it though.
[0] http://blog.hashbangbash.com/2014/04/linking-golang-statically/
