Question

Put on your c++ ninja voodoo gloves.

We purchased a 3rd party library to use in our iOS app. There are 2 versions of that library, so let’s call them bull_frog_noises.a and toad_frog_noises.a.

The company never imagined that someone would want to make both frog noises in a single app, so each library offers the same method name:

MAKE_FROG_NOISE();

Is there a way to rebuild or modify these libraries so they can both be used without colliding with each other? Here is the ideal state:

MAKE_BULL_FROG_NOISE();
MAKE_TOAD_FROG_NOISE();

Answer 1

I would try using a hex editor to manually modify one of those libraries so that every instance of MAKE_FROG_NOISE was replaced with MAKE_TOAD_NOISE. You would have to be extremely careful to make only that one change. You can only replace bytes. Don’t insert or delete anything. And don’t change anything else in the file.