Paul A Vixie writes:

>if you mean the sunos-style shlibs which now dominate the industry, i agree.
>if you mean shared libraries in general, i DISagree.  look at VMS or MPE
>for examples of how to do this in a secure and non-"plain ugly" way.

One might look into the Darwin sources, they're kindof open sore^Hce
after all... from a quick glance at the running system, they seem to
have developped an in-kernel shared library linker, similar to some
System V implementations.
This would probably be a much cleaner approach without many of the
deficiencies of the ad-hoc SunOS4-style runtime linker program.
I might be somewhat confused here, though, and don't have a darwin
machine at hand to check right now.  It might also be the case that
the mechanism is tightly coupled with the Mach superkernel and could
not be reused easily--but having a look doesn't cost anything.

--mkb