Re: C23 thoughts and opinions

On 04/06/2024 03:12, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 3 Jun 2024 11:13:32 +0100, bart wrote:
 

So how does importlib manage to import importlib before importlib
itself is imported?

 I guess the same way a linker manages to link itself.
 

There is NO ahead-of-time linking of modules in Python as it is
understood in traditional compiled languages.

 Python is a compiled language.

CPython does ahead-of-time compilation to bytecode, of individual modules on-demand. There is no AOT compilation of all modules to binary bytecode files which need a linking process before execution starts.
It is utterly different from the linkers used with typical C code.
In the past I have written interpreters that had a discrete bytecode compiler that produced individual files per module containing binary bytecode.
The loading process was handled by the interpreter, a separate program, that fixed things up to allow the program to be run immediately; the output was not another monolithic binary file.
Again this is very different from a traditional linker that combines .o, .a, .lib and .dll files into a single executable.
(With .dll files, they are only used to build import tables of the executable; the library says separate.)