On Saturday, 18 August 2012 at 01:06:10 UTC, Michel Fortin wrote:
In the original linked article (which I wrote) what was proposed was to have the dynamic linker calculate offsets for fields and vtable entries and insert those offsets directly in the code (just like a linker does when it resolves symbols). But for that you'd need a custom linker (both static and dynamic), and probably a custom shared library format. So it's a huge task, especially when you consider that it should run on multiple platforms. But this same approach could make the C++ ABI non-fragile too.
I'm having a hard time to see why a regular application couldn't do this, i.e. druntime. I'm mostly familiar with Mac OS X and seems pretty easy just to access the running executable and change what you want in it. That's what the dynamic linker is doing anyway. There's even a flag for object files indicating it's a dynamic linker (don't know if that is used any more). Sure it would probably break easily if the runtime of the OS changed (new version of the dynamic linker, something changing the object format).
-- /Jacob Carlborg
