binutils-2.21.51 and OpenVMS IA64

[h.becker]

Tristan Gingold wrote:

>> In fact, my goal is to port to IA64 an old Alpha article of mine
>> available at
>> http://vouters.dyndns.org/tima/OpenVMS-Alpha-automatically-creating-shareables-libraries.html
>> For this purpose, I was looking for nm on VMS that I will DCL pipe
>> with a to be developed small gawk program to automatically write the
>> Linker's option file when it comes up to building shareable images.
>> This process is mostly welcomed when porting Opensource codes to
>> OpenVMS and the process includes loadable libraries.
> 
> Interesting...
... but not recommended: on VMS one should know what the public 
interface to a shareable image (shared library) is and not blindly 
export everything. For that reason, the VMS C++ compiler can emit linker 
options, see the /EXPORT_SYMBOLS qualifier. Exporting everything can 
lead to nasty link-time warnings and run-time errors, which include 
producing wrong results. These errors are not easy to detect, to analyze 
and to fix. There are good reasons why the VMS linker developers did not 
implement such an export-everything feature.

And yes, this has nothing to do with binutils and using nm on VMS.