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I had the same opinion until I had to ship the app with shared libraries on different BSD versions and a few older Solarises, besides multiple Linux distributio

by dig1 6y ago

I had the same opinion until I had to ship the app with shared libraries on different BSD versions and a few older Solarises, besides multiple Linux distributions. Even then, I wasn't sure it would work without problems. libtool is ugly because it tries to solve an ugly problem. To support the above, my manual Makefile was uglier than libtool :) These days, if I'd have to do that again, I'll pick libtool without overthinking. People need to learn why some things are as such and should see outside of Ubuntu/Windows/macOS comfort.

jonstewart 6y ago
Would you still have to ship your app on a variety of BSDs and older Solaris versions in 2021, though? On current BSDs, clang works. Solaris and HPUX and AIX and Ultrix and Irix are all, in a word, deprecated. The 2000+ line long shell script that’s used to figure out which args to pass to the compiler, determined on the fly for each source file, can still be used on those deprecated systems, but it should also probably be deprecated itself when all you need is “-fPIC” in your CFLAGS (an oversimplification but not by much).
rleigh 6y ago
Libtool attempted (badly) to solve portability problems between the diverse range of linkers on 90s Unix platforms. Its versioning scheme is utterly insane. It made a slightly difficult problem incredibly complex, and for no good reason. Every current platform of note has a perfectly good linker, making libtool redundant. More often than not, it's been an "anti-portability" impediment when it thinks it knows how to drive modern linkers but because it's barely maintained, it gets it wrong by trying to be too clever. Even proprietary embedded toolchains come with full-fat ELF linkers these days. Of all of the pieces which make up the Autotools, libtool is the one which could be dropped today with zero impact. It's the least useful and the least necessary of them all.

by dig1 6y ago

jonstewart 6y ago

Would you still have to ship your app on a variety of BSDs and older Solaris versions in 2021, though? On current BSDs, clang works. Solaris and HPUX and AIX and Ultrix and Irix are all, in a word, deprecated. The 2000+ line long shell script that’s used to figure out which args to pass to the compiler, determined on the fly for each source file, can still be used on those deprecated systems, but it should also probably be deprecated itself when all you need is “-fPIC” in your CFLAGS (an oversimplification but not by much).

rleigh 6y ago

Libtool attempted (badly) to solve portability problems between the diverse range of linkers on 90s Unix platforms. Its versioning scheme is utterly insane. It made a slightly difficult problem incredibly complex, and for no good reason. Every current platform of note has a perfectly good linker, making libtool redundant. More often than not, it's been an "anti-portability" impediment when it thinks it knows how to drive modern linkers but because it's barely maintained, it gets it wrong by trying to be too clever. Even proprietary embedded toolchains come with full-fat ELF linkers these days. Of all of the pieces which make up the Autotools, libtool is the one which could be dropped today with zero impact. It's the least useful and the least necessary of them all.