Question

I’ve been coding for some time, and I always thought the linking phase of compilation was pretty straight forward, but recently I had to add a plugin system to an app, and I ran into quite a few compilation and runtime problems, due to my complete lack of knowledge on the matter. I’ve now got it working fine and learned a lot in the process, but now that I’ aware I still have a lot to learn on the subject, I wanted to explore the subject more. So I was wondering if anyone had good pointers on articles, blog posts, or books on the whole ‘code sections, symbols, linking, dynamic/static libraries…’ business.

I’m developing on Linux using gcc and ld, but I’m also interested in the M$ way of doing things, I thirst for knowledge 🙂

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here are some good online resources:

• Static, Shared Dynamic and Loadable Linux Libraries
• Program Library HOWTO

Ulrich Drepper (maintainer of glibc) provides a very thorough description of the linux implementation of shared libraries in his paper How To Write Shared Libraries, definitely worth a read if you want to know the nitty-gritty details. I actually can’t think of a book that does a great job covering the details.