DLL vs Shared Library

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 30 March 2006 16:26, Tony Arnold wrote:
> Alan,
>
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> >>As I understand it, DLLs under Windows are shared just like
> >> shared libs on Linux.
> >
> > That's how Microsoft intended it. It's not how it works in
> > RealLife(tm).
> >
> > In RealLife(tm) MS dlls are not versioned like ours are, so an
> > app has no easy way of knowing which version is installed. It
> > might want DirectX version6 but what it gets is version 9, and
> > things don't work right. It's called "dll hell"
>
> That's where they got it wrong. But running two appliactions that
> need the same DLL will mean the DLL only gets loaded once into
> memory, assuming it's the right version etc.

Yes, that part they did get right. It's not all broken, just mostly 
broken :-)

Another huge problem, and this comes about from having no real package 
manager with dependancy tracking on Windows, is a separate copy of a 
vb runtime with every app, just in case.

Not that some *nix vendors are any better - I've seen java apps that 
come with a complete dedicated JRE just for themselves - Sun's own 
Studio tools come to mind

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five