Matthew R. Bisson

Linker Scripting and Linux Shared Library Versioning

The stacks in BPL Version 2.

Shared library versioning is a powerful tool, allowing your library to make new features available without breaking older consumers of them. The problem is — as I’ve noticed through the years — GCC linker scripting seems like witchcraft to many who’d otherwise use it, and only those with tribal knowledge can maintain the library. I agree: this information can be hard to find, and hard to understand. In this article, I’m going to give what I think is a recipe book for using LD version scripting to apply shared library versioning, and keep your library alive and compatible for years.

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Creating a Gentoo Workstation in a VMware Virtual Machine

Today I’m going to walk through the process of creating a development workstation on Gentoo Linux as a (VMware Workstation) virtual machine. This is something that I do myself with somewhat high frequency, and in a way, this page contains notes to myself so that this fairly manual process becomes a great deal less manual. Perhaps it will be interesting to you, the reader, as a Gentoo Linux installation delves deeply into Linux system-level configuration, and provides a great way to familiarize yourself with how things work.

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