[petsc-dev] dynamic loading

[Lisandro Dalcin]

Could any of you tell me exactly the intention of
"--with-dynamic-loading" in the context of PETSc?

I tend to think that dynamic loading of user-defined stuff should
always be supported if dlopen() or equivalent calls are available. For
example, I'm able to build Python from sources with static libraries,
but I can still use Python .so extension modules loaded via dlopen().
So usage of dynamic loading is somewhat orthogonal to static/shared
libraries.

If PETSc-builtin Vec/Mat/KSP/etc subtypes implementations could be
built on separate .so files intended to be loaded at runtime, then
--with-dynamic-loading would ask for such kind of build. And then a
normal build would be just like now (let say, single petsc.so library
with everything bundled). However, regardless of the way PETSc would
be built, users should still be able to dlopen() modules and register
custom subtypes at runtime, even if PETSc was built with static
libraries!!


-- 
Lisandro Dalcin
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