Shared libraries [LWN.net]

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 16:50 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Shared libraries by khim
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

Libabigail is part of the tooling I'd like to see in proper shared library tooling - it covers size and alignment, but not field ordering within the structure (which also ought to be checked by tools). And, of course, if you want something that "just works", you need the size and alignment of structures to not be hard-coded in the user, but rather filled in by the dynamic linker via a COPY or SIZE relocation (causing you to have to do arithmetic all over the place when a structure from the dynamic library is embedded in a user-supplied structure).

Basically, what I want is tooling that tells me if I've made any change that breaks either my API (which currently exists) or my ABI, and that I can have in my build process to tell me when I've made a mistake. And, as Vulkan shows, this is not just about having a way to express "this item has a fixed layout regardless of compiler", but also "you said this was supposed to be unchanging, but you've changed it in a way that's significant. Did you mean to do that?", complete with the ability to reserve space for future expansion (and not in the C-like hacky way of unused fields, but a very deliberate and well-thought through way to reserve sufficient space with good enough alignment for what you might want to fill in that space with, allowing for some fields being fixed in location because they're exposed ABI, and others being mobile because they're opaque to callers).

And yes, this tooling needs co-operation with the compiler - that's table stakes for doing a stable ABI properly. But it also needs a bunch of other things, so that I have to tell my tools that yes, I mean to break the stable ABI here, just as I have to tell my tools (via SemVer changes) that yes, I mean to break the stable API.

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Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 17:04 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> And, of course, if you want something that "just works", you need the size and alignment of structures to not be hard-coded in the user, but rather filled in by the dynamic linker via a COPY or SIZE relocation (causing you to have to do arithmetic all over the place when a structure from the dynamic library is embedded in a user-supplied structure).

It's not “of course”, but “do we really need it?” If structure has a potential of changing size then it's highly unlikely then it's “trivial” structure that would be used somewhere in the critical path. More likely it's some descriptor that needs some non-trivial work to handle it. Swift handles such structures with runtime descriptors and it may be enough to do that.

I would say that if you would try to do that you'll end up with “success” of OSI protocols: lots of hype, lots of talks, zero working implementations.

I would rather see that being marked as “maybe in 10 years if we would have the resources we might attempt that” rather then “that's something that we would use as justification not to do anything”.

> But it also needs a bunch of other things

It needs some things, yes. You are trying to stuff it full of things that are not, strictly speaking, needed, but only desired. That's willful ignorance of RFC1925: It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.

I would say that starting with dynamic dispatch everywhere but some “blessed” types from the standard library (which is essentially what Swift did) would get us 90% there (if not 99% there) and the remaining 1% may be discussed later (or handled with hacky solutions, if needed).

But yes, basic library types like Option<&str> needs to be covered, somehow.

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 17:14 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Runtime descriptors get filled in by the dynamic linker - and all of the things I'm describing are things that are done semi-manually to maintain a stable ABI by Vulkan and glibc developers today.

I'm not arguing that these are required for a minimal solution - but rather that all of these problems have to be solved if you're going to have a stable ABI, and given that Rust needs tooling updates anyway to have a stable ABI, it would be better to have tooling that prevents accidental ABI breakage from day 1 of the Rust stable ABI for dynamic linking, rather than (as you seem to be suggesting) relying on "programmers don't make that mistake".

After all, the lesson of C++ UB is that "programmers don't make that mistake" is virtually always false.

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 26, 2025 17:23 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Runtime descriptors get filled in by the dynamic linker

Nope. Not even remotely close. Rather it's extension of current dyn Trait scheme: in the vtable there are size of the object (so it can be allocated on stack, alloca-style), reference to the constructor (so you can create a vector) and so on. Then generic may have one, common code for that thing and work — even without any dynamic linkage involved.

Very natural extension of the Rust language, not special code for the dynamic libraries. It would be well-received even without dynamic libraries, the ability to have true polymorphic callback is something people desire often.

> After all, the lesson of C++ UB is that "programmers don't make that mistake" is virtually always false.

Yes, but that doesn't mean we have to invent something grandiose, that would require next 10 or 20 years to develop. Simple solution may be better, because it's actually implementable… and we know, from Swift example, what can be implemented in the limited time.

Hint: anything that requires changes to the dynamic linker automatically makes the whole thing DOA. Simply because on Windows dynamic linker is part of the OS and if this scheme wouldn't support Windows then nobody serious would use it.