Next: Callbacks, Previous: Linkage-table, Up: Foreign Linkage
On linkage-table ports SBCL is able to deal with forward-references to aliens – which is to say, compile and load code referring to aliens before the shared object containing the alien in question has been loaded.
This is handled by ENSURE-DYNAMIC-FOREIGN-SYMBOL-ADDRESS, which
first tries to resolve the address in the loaded shared objects, but
failing that records the alien as undefined and returns the address of
a read/write/execute protected guard page for variables, and address
of undefined_alien_function for routines. These are in turn
responsible for catching attempts to access the undefined alien, and
signalling the appropriate error.
These placeholder addresses get recorded in the linkage-table.
When new shared objects are loaded UPDATE-LINKAGE-TABLE is
called, which in turn attempts to resolve all currently undefined
aliens, and registers the correct addresses for them in the
linkage-table.