Foreign Modules That Link Dynamically with Other Libraries

Sometimes a foreign module might have to link dynamically with other (non-XSB) libraries. Typically, this happens when the foreign module implements an interface to a large external library of utilities. One example of this is the package libwww in the XSB distribution, which provides a high-level interface to the W3C's Libwww library for accessing the Web. The library is compiled into a set of shared objects and the libwww module has to link with them as well as with XSB.

The problem here is that the loader must know at run time where to look for the shared objects to link with. On Unix systems, this is specified using the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH; on Windows, the variable name is LIBPATH. For instance, under Bourne shell or its derivatives, the following will do:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=dir1:dir2:dir3
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

One problem with this approach is that this variable must be set before starting XSB. The other problem is that such a global setting might interact with other foreign modules.

To alleviate the problem, XSB dynamically sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH (LIBPATH on Windows) before loading foreign modules by adding the directories specified in the -L option in ldoption. Unfortunately, this works on some systems (Linux), but not on others (Solaris). One route around this difficulty is to build a runtime library search path directly into the object code of the foreign module. This can be specified using a loader flag in ldoption. The problem here is that different systems use a different flag! To circumvent this, XSB provides a predicate that tries to guess the right flag for your system:

runtime_loader_flag(+Hint,-Flag)

Currently it knows about a handful of the most popular systems, but this will be expanded. The argument Hint is not currently used. It might be used in the future to provide runtime_loader_flag with additional information that can improve the accuracy of finding the right runtime flags for various systems.

The above predicate can be used as follows:

    ...,
    runtime_loader_flag(_,Flag),
    fmt_write_string(LDoptions, '%sdir1:dir2:dir2 %s', args(Flag,OldLDoption)),
    fmt_write(File, ':- ldoption(%s).', LDoptions),
    file_nl(File).