linux

This is a long overdue follow up to my glibc’s dynamic linker/loader post from last year. With the Go 1.8 release around the corner, which adds support for dynamic plugins, this is a good time to revisit the topic. Plugins in Go are described by Ian Lance Taylor in the “Go Execution Modes” design document. They are part of a larger effort to support dynamic shared objects in Go. As Ian points out, Go 1.

The post “10 LDFLAGS I love” by Jessie Frazelle reminded me that I know a thing or two about the dynamic linker that many people using Linux rarely need, but when they need them, it’s because they really need them. I came by this knowledge a couple of decades ago, back when I was much more active within Debian than I am today. Debian has always paid a lot of attention to handling shared libraries, and the distribution has pretty strict rules as to how to package them, which led me to dig a bit deeper into how this part of the system works.