Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”
by takeda on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:57AM
(#27012927)
Oh man that brings memories. It's so sad that things like datatypes or xpk didn't made it to modern OSes (well, there's just fraction of it, I guess video codecs are closest thing to it, but that just targets one area).
I also wanted to point out that this standardization made it possible to "pimp" your AmigaOS to make individual desktops somewhat unique. There were basically libraries that substituted system libraries and changed how the UI looked or even how it worked. I kind of miss that. Now the only personalization I see is how the terminal prompt looks like :)
It's a cultural issue, not a technical one - in the Amiga world breaking ABI compatibility is seen as a bug.
If you need to, you add a new function. If you really can't maintain backwards compatibility, you write a new library rather than break an old one.
As a result 35 year old binaries still occasionally get updates because the libraries they use are updated.
And using libraries as an extension point is well established (e.g datatypes to allow you to load new file formats, or xpk which let's any application that supports it handle any compression algorithm there's a library for).
But it requires a discipline around it.