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digitalmars.D.learn - DLL'ing the GC

reply Dan Lewis <murpsoft hotmail.com> writes:
Hi guys,

I was trying to extract the GC from my program into a DLL so that I could
reverse my program and examine the assembly.  The GC accounts for about 75kb of
code, so it's rather substatial to take it out.

Now I've read the D DLL's using an EXE's GC, but I was having trouble doing the
reverse.

At the moment, it's got a symbol undefined even though I'm exporting, but I was
hoping for help beyond that debugging this.  It's a little over my head.

My program is quite a bit more complex, but if I can get this test case going,
I can probably take it from there.
Jan 02 2008
parent reply Dan Lewis <murpsoft hotmail.com> writes:
Dan Lewis Wrote:


 Now I've read the "D DLL's using an EXE's GC", but I was having trouble doing
the reverse.


The file I mentioned is at:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/dll.html#Dcode


 
 At the moment, it's got a symbol undefined even though I'm exporting, but I
was hoping for help beyond that debugging this.  It's a little over my head.


I've since been working on my tokenizer while I waited for a response.  I'll
probably carry on with that for the rest of today in hopes someone has the
patience for me.

Regards,
Dan
Jan 02 2008
parent reply 0ffh <frank youknow.what.todo.interNETz> writes:
Dan Lewis wrote:

 [...]
 I've since been working on my tokenizer while I waited for a
 response.  I'll probably carry on with that for the rest of today in
 hopes someone has the patience for me.


I don't think it's about patience. It's more like it's... nontrivial. =)

I don't know from the top of my head. While I think it's possible to
reassign the work from the EXE's GC to the DLL's at runtime, I'm not
so sure about how you will create the EXE in the first place without
linking it to the GC. You would have to have a kind of proxy GC-lib
that provides all the necessary symbols and minimal memory management
(allocation) until the GC-in-the-DLL is loaded. You then recompile
you runtime lib (Phobos or Tango, btw?) with that GC-"stub".

All that sounds like a long, nontrivial process, and will probably
not be explained exhaustively in one posting, as you'll have to do
it in order to know what exactly you have to do. =)

regards, frank
Jan 03 2008
parent Dan <murpsoft hotmail.com> writes:
0ffh Wrote:


 Dan Lewis wrote:

 [...]
 I've since been working on my tokenizer while I waited for a
 response.  I'll probably carry on with that for the rest of today in
 hopes someone has the patience for me.


 
 I don't think it's about patience. It's more like it's... nontrivial. =)
 
 I don't know from the top of my head. While I think it's possible to
 reassign the work from the EXE's GC to the DLL's at runtime, I'm not
 so sure about how you will create the EXE in the first place without
 linking it to the GC. You would have to have a kind of proxy GC-lib
 that provides all the necessary symbols and minimal memory management
 (allocation) until the GC-in-the-DLL is loaded. You then recompile
 you runtime lib (Phobos or Tango, btw?) with that GC-"stub".
 
 All that sounds like a long, nontrivial process, and will probably
 not be explained exhaustively in one posting, as you'll have to do
 it in order to know what exactly you have to do. =)
 
 regards, frank


Alright guys, I've got the GC in a DLL, and apparently there's a separate file
provided with DMD that provides the symbols for the GC, without bringing in the
whole machine.

I need to figure out how to:

1) compile Walnut without the GC in it.
2) cause Walnut to use the GC DLL.

Getting this solved will let us profile programs in a disassembler without 80kb
of unrelated crap staring back.
Jan 12 2008