[TUHS] About Unix header files

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-08-22T11:46:30-0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 11:29:40 -0400 Paul Winalski
> <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 8/22/18, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > To my knowledge, object file formats still don't have information
> > > about type signatures, and linkers still don't care about types.
> > > This is actually a problem. It would probably prevent a lot of
> > > errors if those things changed.
> > 
> > For a linker to enforce (or warn about) type and call signature
> > matching, it would have to know the type and call semantics of each
> > particular language,
> 
> Not necessarily. One could produce a language-independent way of
> signaling what the type signatures are (perhaps with normalized
> language-dependent strings) and the linker could just check that they
> match.
> 
> I've seen several languages (like OCaml) hack around the lack of this
> by providing an auxiliary file for a pre-link phase to check off
> of. It would be nicer if the linker could just handle that.

My impression is that Ada's .ali (I haven't seen an official mnemonic,
but "Ada Link Information" seems likely) files provide this security.

-- 
Regards,
Branden
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