gawk: Old Extension Problems
C.5.1 Problems With The Old Mechanism
-------------------------------------
The old extension mechanism had several problems:
* It depended heavily upon 'gawk' internals. Any time the 'NODE'
structure(1) changed, an extension would have to be recompiled.
Furthermore, to really write extensions required understanding
something about 'gawk''s internal functions. There was some
documentation in this Info file, but it was quite minimal.
* Being able to call into 'gawk' from an extension required linker
facilities that are common on Unix-derived systems but that did not
work on MS-Windows systems; users wanting extensions on MS-Windows
had to statically link them into 'gawk', even though MS-Windows
supports dynamic loading of shared objects.
* The API would change occasionally as 'gawk' changed; no
compatibility between versions was ever offered or planned for.
Despite the drawbacks, the 'xgawk' project developers forked 'gawk'
and developed several significant extensions. They also enhanced
'gawk''s facilities relating to file inclusion and shared object access.
A new API was desired for a long time, but only in 2012 did the
'gawk' maintainer and the 'xgawk' developers finally start working on it
together. More information about the 'xgawk' project is provided in
gawkextlib.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) A critical central data structure inside 'gawk'.
Info Catalog
gawk: Extension Design
gawk: Extension New Mechanism Goals