On 2012-09-29 17:40, Maxim Fomin wrote:
I was not taking about dynamic loading, but about dynamic linking. If I understand topic right, the issue is the former, not the latter.
The title of the thread says "... and loading".
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.
I agree, in these cases their no point in using dynamic loading.
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.
Exactly, pluggins are one of the main reasons for using dynamic loading. An other reason is license issues. There's a D library called Derelict which uses dynamic loading to load C libraries (OpenGL, SDL, OpenAL and others). One of the many reason for Derelict using dynamic loading is due to license issues/complications with these libraries.
http://dsource.org/projects/derelict/
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?".
There's no point in doing that. But what I'm saying is if you know beforehand the libraries you will use you can get quite far with static libraries.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
