Question

Two projects:

• The loader, a standalone executable (only loads modules)
• any module, a shared library (librainbowdash.so) (there can be many modules)

Now, the module is linked with -lpthreads, but I get some weird errors which make me think pthreads is bound as a shared object only, and when the loader loads a module pthreads are not being loaded. (debugging with GDB is impossible, that kind of errors).

I thought the -l switch only allows static libraries? Does it? Doesn’t it?

Answer 1

-l specifies library names. It is up to the linker to resolve the library names into static libraries or shared objects to be linked against as appropriate. And it is the loader’s job to load any shared libraries used.