I heard about Dolt recently. This is a minimal replacement for libtool that works only on Linux. It seems like a great idea, long overdue… though of course for new programs you should just use Quagmire, which, as I’ve said before, replaces libtool with two lines of code.
I’m into lisp these days, so much so that I’ve considered ranting about it here. I’ve read CLtL2 and I plan to read another online CL book. Anyway, I ran across this funny-ish lisp comic yesterday.
Elyn’s latest blog entry made me laugh out loud.
Steve Yegge’s new javascript mode for Emacs is now in ELPA — if you use js you should check it out.
3 Comments
> [dolt] seems like a great idea, long overdue…
I hope you simply didn’t read well enough. dolt outperforms libtool 1.5.x by a large margin, still beats 2.2.2 but not noticeably so with most real-world projects. At the same time, it loses functionality over libtool, works only on a tiny but often-used subset of systems, and improves compile mode only. We’ve put some more improvements in upcoming 2.2.4, and all of those done in libtool benefit virtually all modern systems, and concern not only compile mode.
I’m all for competition, and there’s certainly a lot of room for criticizing libtool, but please be fair.
My current conviction is that libtool has too many features and generally does too much work. Also, it seems to me that it puts the slow code on the common path, shared by all operating systems, in order to support the needs of a few retro systems.
Perhaps I’m mistaken about that. In that case Quagmire could comfortably be changed to use libtool. But meanwhile I think I will press forward. I’m definitely open to hearing arguments about libtool’s suitability.
For a very long time (at least ten years) I have felt that if gcc -fPIC at compile time, and gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,whatever at link time, is not sufficient to get shared libraries, then it is not worth supporting shared libraries on that system.