[Vm-dev] Stupidifying FFI/library loading mechanism

[Andreas Raab]

On 5/26/2011 20:12, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 26.05.2011, at 13:48, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>> Hello,
>> i am fed up seeing the messages like "FFI can't find a library" or "VM
>> can't find my plugin".
> I agree for FFI libraries. I do not agree for VM modules.
>
> IMHO it is a terrible idea to lump the two together. They happen to share an implementation, but that is rather incidental.

+1. It's a mistake to lump those two together for sure. +1 also for the 
idea of having more (and better) failure information on why loading of 
any of them failed (this holds both for the FFI as well as the plugins 
because their load failure is often even more mysterious).

However, a big -1 on the idea of a "dumb" FFI loading function if by 
"dumb" we mean it to ignore the standard system paths on the platform 
(LD_LIBRARY_PATH and friends). The whole idea of these is to provide 
executable with the proper information to find those modules; why on 
earth would we ignore the information that is specifically provided for 
that purpose?

Cheers,
   - Andreas