Shared libraries [LWN.net]

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 10:00 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Shared libraries by ssokolow
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

My definition of "rely on" is "the tooling gives me an error if I mismatch the shared library version and the header file". Very few C and C++ libraries make that guarantee - the only library I'm aware of that does make that guarantee is glibc, and they do a lot of work with symbol versioning to make that happen.

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Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 10:15 UTC (Wed) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link]

I missed that you said "can't" instead of "can". Sorry.

I suspect anything which satisfies both your goals and the Rust devs' goals will be paired with some kind of link-time hackery to ensure that what would otherwise have been statically linked will refuse to start if the subset of the provided library that's being used is not 100% ABI compatible.

"'Just don't make mistakes' doesn't scale" is, after all, a core element of Rust's design philosophy.