dynamic library building and loading

Maxim Fomin maxim at maxim-fomin.ru
Sat Sep 29 08:40:04 PDT 2012


On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 13:19:01 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> That's a fairly uninteresting test.

I am not a D developer which means I have no incentive in blindly 
portraying D as a language having shared libraries support when 
in fact it has some issues. I am a D user which has incentive to 
gladly report which part of D does work (or seems to work) and 
which doesn't when making shared libraries.

> You are linking to the dynamic library. What's interesting is 
> loading a dynamic library using dlopen, or similar. What's the 
> point of using dynamic libraries if you're linking with them?

I was not taking about dynamic loading, but about dynamic 
linking. If I understand topic right, the issue is the former, 
not the latter.

BTW, in majority cases dynamic loading gives no advantages over 
dynamic linking (just the opposite: doing unnecessary job which 
can be done by linker and loader). In most cases, when an app is 
being written, it is known which functional from which 
third-party libraries would be used. The only exceptions I can 
name are pluggin support and hacker's binary ELF/PE tools. I can 
count few apps in windows and linux which are used often, which 
dynamically load something, and if they do, they likely load 
pluggins. This was made for cases when app developers by 
definition cannot know beforehand full list of used shared 
libraries. So, the question is just opposite: "What's the point 
of using dynamic loading if you know beforehand which libraries 
you use, which happens almost in all cases?".

But I certainly agree that dynamic loading is essential for some 
applications, if not irreplaceable, and support of it also needed 
to be inspected and improved.


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