(By dynamic loading I mean using something like the C library function dlopen to explicitly load a shared object at runtime. I do not mean dynamic linking in the usual passive sense.)

I just successfully got working a toy example of dynamically loading (from a D program) a D shared object and then finding and calling functions defined in the shared object, and not just with C linkage.

The main program, main.d, was compiled and linked somewhat normally, except for passing the linker via gcc the flags necessary to ensure that the whole of libphobos2.a is present and that all symbols in the resulting executable are exposed dynamically.

The shared object source, dload.d was compiled to an object file containing position independent code by dmd. Then I invoked the linker explicitly and had it make a shared object without the D runtime system or Phobos. This is the novel step, and it enables the shared object to resolve its linkage to the D runtime system and Phobos at the point of being loaded, via callbacks to the main program. Thus the troubles of D in shared objects are largely circumvented. There is only one instance of phobos and D-runtime, in the main program. (Once phobos and druntime are shared objects in the future somewhere this will work with no code bloat.)

The static initialization code in dload.d is automatically executed when the shared object libdload.so is loaded by the main program, because the linker is also passed a flag indicating the static initialization block's mangled name, dynamically determined from dload.o before linkage to libdload.so occurs.

Finally, the mangled names of the functions to load are determined by a call of a function with C linkage in dload.d from main.d that looks up those names in an associative array initialized in the static initialization block of dload.d where those mangled names are directly available, so that full D linkage can be emulated, at least for functions.

One thing: the garbage collector needs to be aware of static and 'global' D variables in the shared object. Can a technical expert verify that I've done the right thing to achieve that happy state of affairs in this unusual context?

So, what's overlooked here? I know that the static initialization code cannot successfully throw an exception. Yet if a function in the shared object is called from the main program and throws an exception, all is well. (Try these.) See my comments in dload.d about this. What is it about the implementation of exceptions that's problematic here?

All files attached, including a Makefile with the exact options passed to dmd, gcc and ld.

On 2012-08-20 05:40, Carl Sturtivant wrote:
> (By dynamic loading I mean using something like the C library function
> dlopen to explicitly load a shared object at runtime. I do not mean
> dynamic linking in the usual passive sense.)
>
> I just successfully got working a toy example of dynamically loading
> (from a D program) a D shared object and then finding and calling
> functions defined in the shared object, and not just with C linkage.
>
> The main program, main.d, was compiled and linked somewhat normally,
> except for passing the linker via gcc the flags necessary to ensure that
> the whole of libphobos2.a is present and that all symbols in the
> resulting executable are exposed dynamically.
>
> The shared object source, dload.d was compiled to an object file
> containing position independent code by dmd. Then I invoked the linker
> explicitly and had it make a shared object without the D runtime system
> or Phobos. This is the novel step, and it enables the shared object to
> resolve its linkage to the D runtime system and Phobos at the point of
> being loaded, via callbacks to the main program. Thus the troubles of D
> in shared objects are largely circumvented. There is only one instance
> of phobos and D-runtime, in the main program. (Once phobos and druntime
> are shared objects in the future somewhere this will work with no code
> bloat.)
>
> The static initialization code in dload.d is automatically executed when
> the shared object libdload.so is loaded by the main program, because the
> linker is also passed a flag indicating the static initialization
> block's mangled name, dynamically determined from dload.o before linkage
> to libdload.so occurs.
>
> Finally, the mangled names of the functions to load are determined by a
> call of a function with C linkage in dload.d from main.d that looks up
> those names in an associative array initialized in the static
> initialization block of dload.d where those mangled names are directly
> available, so that full D linkage can be emulated, at least for functions.
>
> One thing: the garbage collector needs to be aware of static and
> 'global' D variables in the shared object. Can a technical expert verify
> that I've done the right thing to achieve that happy state of affairs in
> this unusual context?
>
> So, what's overlooked here? I know that the static initialization code
> cannot successfully throw an exception. Yet if a function in the shared
> object is called from the main program and throws an exception, all is
> well. (Try these.) See my comments in dload.d about this. What is it
> about the implementation of exceptions that's problematic here?
>
> All files attached, including a Makefile with the exact options passed
> to dmd, gcc and ld.

I'm not sure I'm following what you exactly have done here but in general this is what needs to be done to make dynamic libraries properly work in D :

* Initialize module infos (module constructors and similar)
* Add TLS variables
* Add exception handling tables
* Add GC roots

The above four things need to be extracted from the loaded dynamic library and it gets loaded and preferably remove them as well when the dynamic library gets unloaded. Currently this is only extracted from the running executable. This is platform dependent but usually it's extracted using bracketed sections via extern C variables.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Monday, 20 August 2012 at 07:26:40 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-08-20 05:40, Carl Sturtivant wrote:
>> (By dynamic loading I mean using something like the C library function
>> dlopen to explicitly load a shared object at runtime. I do not mean
>> dynamic linking in the usual passive sense.)
>>
>> I just successfully got working a toy example of dynamically loading
>> (from a D program) a D shared object and then finding and calling
>> functions defined in the shared object, and not just with C linkage.
>>
>> The main program, main.d, was compiled and linked somewhat normally,
>> except for passing the linker via gcc the flags necessary to ensure that
>> the whole of libphobos2.a is present and that all symbols in the
>> resulting executable are exposed dynamically.
>>
>> The shared object source, dload.d was compiled to an object file
>> containing position independent code by dmd. Then I invoked the linker
>> explicitly and had it make a shared object without the D runtime system
>> or Phobos. This is the novel step, and it enables the shared object to
>> resolve its linkage to the D runtime system and Phobos at the point of
>> being loaded, via callbacks to the main program. Thus the troubles of D
>> in shared objects are largely circumvented. There is only one instance
>> of phobos and D-runtime, in the main program. (Once phobos and druntime
>> are shared objects in the future somewhere this will work with no code
>> bloat.)
>>
>> The static initialization code in dload.d is automatically executed when
>> the shared object libdload.so is loaded by the main program, because the
>> linker is also passed a flag indicating the static initialization
>> block's mangled name, dynamically determined from dload.o before linkage
>> to libdload.so occurs.
>>
>> Finally, the mangled names of the functions to load are determined by a
>> call of a function with C linkage in dload.d from main.d that looks up
>> those names in an associative array initialized in the static
>> initialization block of dload.d where those mangled names are directly
>> available, so that full D linkage can be emulated, at least for functions.
>>
>> One thing: the garbage collector needs to be aware of static and
>> 'global' D variables in the shared object. Can a technical expert verify
>> that I've done the right thing to achieve that happy state of affairs in
>> this unusual context?
>>
>> So, what's overlooked here? I know that the static initialization code
>> cannot successfully throw an exception. Yet if a function in the shared
>> object is called from the main program and throws an exception, all is
>> well. (Try these.) See my comments in dload.d about this. What is it
>> about the implementation of exceptions that's problematic here?
>>
>> All files attached, including a Makefile with the exact options passed
>> to dmd, gcc and ld.
>
> I'm not sure I'm following what you exactly have done here but in general this is what needs to be done to make dynamic libraries properly work in D :
>
> * Initialize module infos (module constructors and similar)
> * Add TLS variables
> * Add exception handling tables
> * Add GC roots
>
> The above four things need to be extracted from the loaded dynamic library and it gets loaded and preferably remove them as well when the dynamic library gets unloaded. Currently this is only extracted from the running executable. This is platform dependent but usually it's extracted using bracketed sections via extern C variables.

Should this be made automatically by the compiler?

This would be my expectation based on my experience with dynamic libraries in Turbo Pascal/Delphi.

--
Paulo

On 2012-08-20 13:38, Paulo Pinto wrote:

> Should this be made automatically by the compiler?
>
> This would be my expectation based on my experience with dynamic
> libraries in Turbo Pascal/Delphi.

This should be handled automatically by the runtime.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Monday, 20 August 2012 at 12:15:28 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-08-20 13:38, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
>> Should this be made automatically by the compiler?
>>
>> This would be my expectation based on my experience with dynamic
>> libraries in Turbo Pascal/Delphi.
>
> This should be handled automatically by the runtime.

Ah ok, from your explanation I understood as something we are required to do manually.

On 2012-08-20 16:22, Paulo Pinto wrote:

> Ah ok, from your explanation I understood as something we are required
> to do manually.

I just explained what changes need to be done in order for it to work. So we need to modify druntime to do what I listed above.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

>
> I'm not sure I'm following what you exactly have done here but in general this is what needs to be done to make dynamic libraries properly work in D :
>
> * Initialize module infos (module constructors and similar)
> * Add TLS variables
> * Add exception handling tables
> * Add GC roots
>
> The above four things need to be extracted from the loaded dynamic library and it gets loaded and preferably remove them as well when the dynamic library gets unloaded. Currently this is only extracted from the running executable. This is platform dependent but usually it's extracted using bracketed sections via extern C variables.

OK, good to know. Any further hints about these, or where I can look?

What I've done is use the C dynamic loading library (header dlfcn.h) to manually load a shared object written in D, dload.d, from a D program (main.d), which then successfully calls functions in dload.d that are not defined extern(C).

I am attempting a do-it-yourself dynamic loading in D, where I explicitly do all the administration manually to make it work, rather than rely upon D to do it automatically. Hence my use of the C dynamic loading library, which knows nothing of additional work D must do.

Reason for this approach: the newsgroups indicate that dynamic loading in D does not work as yet.

What's novel is that I explicitly excluded from the shared object anything but code generated directly from dload.d:

dmd -c dload.d -m64 -fPIC
ld dload.o -shared -o libdload.so -m elf_x86_64 -E

And I included the whole of libphobos.a in the build of the main program:

dmd -c main.d -m64
gcc main.o -o main -m64 -Wl,-E -ldl -Wl,--whole-archive -lphobos2 \
-Wl,--no-whole-archive -lcurl -lpthread -lm -lrt

This tactic is in the hope that all parts of D used in the shared library will find their linkage in the main program when it's dynamically loaded. (And the -E option passed to the linker in both cases is to expose all symbols for exactly this purpose.)

Reason for this approach: the newsgroups indicate that D runtime/phobos (all currently in libphobos.a it seems) does not initialize properly in a shared library, so I ensure that it's not present at all, and endeavor to have the shared object implicitly use the properly working D runtime/phobos in the main executable.

[And besides, at 64 bits all code in shared libraries apparently must be position independent, so even if I wanted to link parts of libphobos.a into the shared library, I couldn't without recompiling libphobos.a with the -fPIC option!]

This bare-bones-in-the-shared-library approach has worked well in my toy example. The only thing that apparently doesn't work is if an exception is thrown from the static initializer 'static this()' in the shared object. If an exception results from a call chain initiated by the main program even if thrown from a function in the shared object, all is well it seems.

Incidentally, I fibbed slightly about the ld command used to link the shared object. It also contains a trailing

  -init=$(shell staticCtor dload.o)

which enables the linker to bind in execution of the static initializer 'static this()' so that it runs automatically when the shared library is loaded. staticCtor is a script that analyzes dload.o to find its name, which is mangled of course.

If anyone can give me any more specific information about what else I can make happen manually to complete effective linkage at the D level I'd be grateful. I'm not stopping the investigation here!

On 2012-08-20 17:16, Carl Sturtivant wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm not sure I'm following what you exactly have done here but in
>> general this is what needs to be done to make dynamic libraries
>> properly work in D :
>>
>> * Initialize module infos (module constructors and similar)
>> * Add TLS variables
>> * Add exception handling tables
>> * Add GC roots
>>
>> The above four things need to be extracted from the loaded dynamic
>> library and it gets loaded and preferably remove them as well when the
>> dynamic library gets unloaded. Currently this is only extracted from
>> the running executable. This is platform dependent but usually it's
>> extracted using bracketed sections via extern C variables.
>
> OK, good to know. Any further hints about these, or where I can look?

From druntime:

* rt.minfo - module infos. The "_moduleinfo_array" variable contains the module infos.

* rt.deh2 - exception handling. On Mac OS X the "_deh_eh_array" contains the exception handling tables. On the other Posix systems the sections bracketed by "_deh_beg" and "_deh_end" contains the tables.

* rt.thread - threading, TLS. On Mac OS X the TLS variables are stored in "_tls_data_array". On the other Posix systems they're are again stored in bracketed sections: "_tlsstart" and "_tlsend".

* rt.memory - GC roots. I think this module contains code related to adding GC roots. rt.memory_osx for Mac OS X.

You can also take a look at work by Martin Nowak:

https://github.com/dawgfoto/druntime/commits/SharedRuntime

> What I've done is use the C dynamic loading library (header dlfcn.h) to
> manually load a shared object written in D, dload.d, from a D program
> (main.d), which then successfully calls functions in dload.d that are
> not defined extern(C).
>
> I am attempting a do-it-yourself dynamic loading in D, where I
> explicitly do all the administration manually to make it work, rather
> than rely upon D to do it automatically. Hence my use of the C dynamic
> loading library, which knows nothing of additional work D must do.

The functions from dlfcn.h is what D would use as well. Possibly wrapped in some D function that does some additional work.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

>snip<

If we had dynamic loading, would we be able to do dependency
injection in D?

On Wednesday, 22 August 2012 at 15:51:05 UTC, Philip Daniels wrote:
>>snip<
>
> If we had dynamic loading, would we be able to do dependency
> injection in D?

Dependency injection does not require dynamic loading per se.

It is all about using interfaces instead of classes, and initializing the corresponding instance members.

You just need some piece of code that takes the responsibility of locating such interfaces, by registering the classes somehow, or by compile time reflection, which gets called on program initialization.

You can do this in D today.

--
Paulo