It is not always suitable to statically link object files into a single executable, and Linux provides us with a mechanism to produce an ELF executable that would be linked with the required libraries (shared objects) dynamically at runtime. The Flat Assembler used to have relatively basic support for ELF, meaning one could only create an executable that would use system calls directly, or create an object file to be linked with others (exactly in the manner we did).

Flat Assembler's support for ELF was extended with the release of version 1.69.05 --a few segment attributes were added along with several convenience macros, which let us manually create the import table in an ELF executable. These macros are in the Linux package under the examples/elfexe/dynamic directory (underlined in the following screenshot):

These macros may be found under the linux_include folder in the accompanying code for this chapter.