[TUHS] shared objects in Unix

[Steve Johnson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com>
To:"Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
Cc:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Sent:Thu, 29 Mar 2018 20:40:36 -0400
Subject:Re: [TUHS] shared objects in Unix

....

​Unless it came from a place like Sun or Sun where Larry or Charlie
might remember, I suspect that Steve Johnson is probably best to
answer this part of your question -- assuming that it was created
during his time in the compiler team in Summit.

I think shared libraries were already in the code base (although
perhaps not released) when I came to Summit in 1982.   One of my
main motivations was to make a product out of C++, which already
looked like a winner in Research.  One of the first things I did was
to ship cfront -- this was a RATFOR like extension that translated C++
into C and then compiled it.   Writing C++ with it wasn't too bad,
because it mapped the C++ line numbers into the C file, but debugging
it was ghastly.  The mapping to C involved long names that had
encoded information about the type and class membership and other
gook, making the debugger almost worthless.  (We were also shipping
Pascal, Ada, and Fortran, which had lesser versions of the same
problem).  So we immediately set off to improve the debugging.  I
think shared libraries was based on an implementation done in a
development area rather than Research, but it and COFF got a lot of
tweaking to support Elf and Dwarf.  A real C++ compiler, based on the
PCC2 backend, came along as well, about the time we got the debugging
figured out, and the final product was, IMHO, pretty respectable.

A word about why I went to Summit.  When I started managing, my
interest in technology transfer ramped up quickly.  As far as AT&T
was concerned, the research culture and the development culture were
very different.  And the only technology transfer that seemed to work
involved moving people.  Reseach people had the best job in the
world, and didn't want to move. But I found that, more and more, I was
enjoying writing code that people liked to use much more than I
enjoyed giving papers to 200 people who couldn't wait for me to sit
down so they could talk about what they were doing.  So I decided to
give it a try.

I still remember my first staff meeting with my department's
supervisors.  In 15 years in Reasearch, I never had heard anyone
commit to deliver a given feature at a given time!  And this happened
many times in that meeting.  By the end, I realized that I wasn't in
Kansas any more...   I learned tons from my supervisors, and I think
they learned a lot from me.  It was altogether a wonderful
experience, except for the fact that AT&T continually demonstrated its
complete ignorance of the software marketplace by hiring clueless
people.  At one point, a documentation person wrote up so
documentation based on fodder we have given them.  When it came back,
it was completely incoherent.  I gave it to my supervisors and they
didn't get it either.  Suddenly one said.  "My God!  They think the
Fortran Optimizer is a piece of hardware!"   Sure enough, from that
point of view it made sense despite its total isolation from the real
world.

Steve


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