DLL symbol identity

[Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d]

Thanks for the insight into how this affects MSVC++, too.

How much work do you think would have to be done at startup of
an application like Firefox or QtCreator if they were not in
C++, but D?

Most of us have no idea what the algorithm would look like and
what data sets to expect.

I guess you'd have to collect all the imported symbols from
all exe/dll modules and put the list of addresses for each
unique symbol into some multi-set that maps symbol names to a
list of adresses:

"abc" -> [a.dll @ 0x359428F0, b.dll @ 0x5E30A410]
"def" -> [b.dll @ 0x38C3D200]

Then the symbol name is no longer relevant so it can be
thought of as an array of address arrays

[
  [0x359428F0, 0x5E30A410],
  [0x38C3D200]
]

where you pick one item from each of the arrays (e.g. the
first one and map all others to that):

0x359428F0 -> 0x359428F0
0x5E30A410 -> 0x359428F0
0x38C3D200 -> 0x38C3D200

Then you go through all import address tables and perform
the above remapping to make symbols unique.

Is that what would happen?

-- 
Marco