4 ms·

Mostly because on all mainstream OSes you see today, C is the lowest-common-denominator ABI that a lot of the code is written in, and for historical reasons C d

Mostly because on all mainstream OSes you see today, C is the lowest-common-denominator ABI that a lot of the code is written in, and for historical reasons C does not require or expect any extra information. Thus, it's not standard. Which is why some systems have tried to add their own layer of extra metadata, such as Windows COM and GTK's gobject(introspection). I don't know how these systems store their metadata, but ELF at least is flexible enough that you should be able to store your metadata in extra sections of the SO. However, (and I'm just speculating here, hopefully more informed people will correct me) there's also a risk that part of the tool ecosystem doesn't know what to do with the in-ELF metadata and accidentally removes it: "strip" comes to mind, the tool that removes extra symbols and debugging information from binaries and libraries.

pjmlp 9y ago
> I don't know how these systems store their metadata, but ELF at least is flexible enough that you should be able to store your metadata in extra sections of the SO. Window executable and dynamic libraries are very flexible and always allowed for resource and metadata sections. COM uses type libraries, which have been replaced by .NET Metadata on UWP (basically COM Runtime reborn, .NET genesis).
floatboth 9y ago
gobject-introspection generates metadata from source code, stores it as XML files in $PREFIX/share/gir-1.0 and as binary files in $PREFIX/lib/girepository-1.0 And yeah, seems like strip is one of the reasons why they don't store it in the ELF. But also: cross-platform compatibility (GTK does support Windows and macOS).