Hello Neil!

Replying to a message of Neil Heller to William McBrine:

 NH>> Does Linux use DLLs?

 WM>> Linux calls them "shared libraries", and their names
end in ".so"
 WM>> (plus a version number, usually); but the concept and function is
 WM>> the same.

 NH> If I were to build an application using shared libraries, what sorts
 NH> of  version problems would I run into if the application were to be 
 NH> distributed far and wide (presumably beyond my control)?

None - you'd distribute source code plus a makefile.  ;-)

Seriously, you'd simply decree a minimum glibc level, and no one with an
older version should use your application.  Gnu does a pretty good job of
maintaining backwards compatability.

 NH> This compiled to 80kb in debug mode and 24kb in release mode.  What 
 NH> would I need to do to the above file to compile it *nix so that it
 NH> used  a shared library?  I've always thought that bigger was better
 NH> but now  I'm not so sure.

Nothing.  That's the default.  You'd have to change your commandline to the
linker (nominally 'ld', but you can get gcc/g++ to call it for you) to
statically link libc if that's what you wanted (and I'm not sure how far
that can get you).

 WM>> But I was under the impression that msvcrtXX.dll _was_ Microsoft
 WM>> Visual C's version of the standard library. (Dunno, I've never
 WM>> actually used MSVC.)

 NH> I searched around my system for "*msvcrt*" and got 13 hits, 12 of
 NH> which  were used by MS.  It seems to me that if this (these) file(s)
 NH> contained  stdlib, it would be misnamed (unless it also contained the
 NH> code for  stdio.

No app can (successfully) load more than one msvcrt DLL since they'll have
duplicate names between them.  Note that this is not different from unix.

Darin

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