Re: Making MiNTOS the underlying Atari Operating System

[Sven Karlsson <f92sk@efd.lth.se>]

> On Sat, 14 Sep 1996, Sven Karlsson wrote:
> 
> > Dynamically linked libraries does NOT need any VM at all in fact using
> > dynamically linked libraries usually decreases memory usage. AmigaOS have had
> > libraries (which is dynamically loaded) from the beginning. Dyn. loaded libs 
> > works like this..
> 
> I know all that - what about global variables that need to be referenced 
> either in the library or from the library?  The linking is the tough part.
> If it were so easy, it would have been done by now!
> 
> VM and copy on write operations make sharing libraries a no-brainer.
> 

Well it all depends upon how you make the implementation. The best 
implementation (from my point of view) which works both with and without VM is 
that the library and the application communicate through shared memory and 
messages ie for each operation which involves sharing of some memory the 
library allocates some memory that is shared with the application the rest of 
the communication is done by messages.

I have a limited implementation of libraries that I have used to test some 
things for Fenix however I do not believe it is worth releasing yet since good 
message and thread handling is required (and that part is in Fenix).

Regards
	Sven Karlsson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Student of Engineering Physics at Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden

Soft- and Hardware developer @ Istari Software
Current project: Code ,an interactive development tool for video
	game consoles including Editor,Debugger and Assembler
	Fenix, a new OO OS for Atari compatible computers.
E-mail: f92sk@efd.lth.se or tomten@df.lth.se
WWW: http://www.efd.lth.se/~f92sk