[Gambas-user] Form embedding, building devel version

[Rob Kendrick]

Rob Kendrick wrote:
> Benoit Minisini wrote:
>> Because Gambas IS an interpreter. But if you like, you can write a 
>> compiler for Gambas of course :-)
> 
> 
> You seem to have already done so: gbc.  And such a thing isn't actually 
> necessary for such a scheme anyway.

This thread appears to have died with insuffcient discussion for me to 
understand the issues at hand.

Why is the fact that Gambas is an interpreter stopping it from producing
ELF binaries?  My request is as follows:

   1. Make the interpreter available as a library as well as an
      executable
   2. Provide a small "stub" object file built during Gambas's build,
      that uses the library version of the interpreter to execute
      the application that is stored in some static structure in the
      executable
   3. Allow building of application via dumping all the bits needed
      to run it out to a very simple ELF file that just contains the
      data as a static structure, and linking that to the stub and
      the interpreter library to generate an executable.

This has the advantages that you have the option of statically linking 
your application if you so wish, so you don't require any other 
libraries or runtimes to run your application somewhere, as well as 
independance from system to system about where the gambas interpreter is 
stored.  It also provides version support between different incompatible 
interpreters that may (or may not) appear over time via the soname 
functionality.  And all this with only having to have ld installed, not 
the whole gcc suite.  (Which is usually packaged seperately anyway.)

I'm not suggesting that this sort of mechinism should *replace* the 
current, but it might be a handy option to have.
-- 
Rob Kendrick
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