[Mono-devel-list] Proposal: Library Loading

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 05:07, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> Jonathan Pryor wrote:
> > The downside is it's still a multi-file approach, with the performance
> > implications that implies (extra startup time, etc.).
> 
> I general, I think the worry for this is mainly due to dlls, right?  So: 
> have gacutil collect the .libinfo file at the same time it installs the 
> dll into the GAC, and aggregate them all into one file.  Then, you'd 
> only have to load the GAC libinfo file, and one or two that are specific 
> to the application.  If another implementation (i.e. P.NET, etc.) wants 
> to do something different, the data would be there in the per-assembly 
> .libinfo file, not requiring any special installation.

I should have thought of that last night.  Excellent idea.

Following this idea, Mono's gacutil becomes a combination of the normal
.NET gacutil and miguel's mlibconf.  This would certainly simplify
matters, as only one program would be needed instead of two.

As you mention, mono would need to manually load the .libmap files for
assemblies that are not in the GAC.  This is the only sane thing to do
if we wish to preserve "xcopy deployment"; otherwise, the user/installer
would need to manually run gacutil/mlibconf to insert the library
information for the applications non-shared assemblies, which would
greatly complicate moving a private application between systems.

 - Jon