DEC OSF/1

Under DEC OSF/1, you can take any simple object file and produce a shared object file by running the ld command over it with the correct options. The commands to do this look like:

# simple DEC OSF/1 example
% cc -c foo.c
% ld -shared -expect_unresolved '*' -o foo.so foo.o

The resulting shared object file can then be loaded into Postgres. When specifying the object file name to the create function command, one must give it the name of the shared object file (ending in .so) rather than the simple object file.

Tip: Actually, Postgres does not care what you name the file as long as it is a shared object file. If you prefer to name your shared object files with the extension .o, this is fine with Postgres so long as you make sure that the correct file name is given to the create function command. In other words, you must simply be consistent. However, from a pragmatic point of view, we discourage this practice because you will undoubtedly confuse yourself with regards to which files have been made into shared object files and which have not. For example, it's very hard to write Makefiles to do the link-editing automatically if both the object file and the shared object file end in .o!

If the file you specify is not a shared object, the backend will hang!