BTW: Shared libraries predate Windows. Operating systems such as VMS have used shared libraries for many years. While Shared Libraries are more recent to Unix, many Unix systems have used the sharing concept on executables for years. When you load an execuatble program, it is essentially split into 3 segments, text, data and bss. The text is normally read-only and shared such that multiple instances will share the same text section, even when executed by another user. Each instance gets its own private data (initialized data) and bss (uninitialized data). Some implementations allow for multiple instances to even share data segments under some circumstances. "Steven T. Hatton" wrote:
Indeed "Shared Object" is correct. They are, what have been know in the industry for quite some time as, dynamically linked libraries or DLLs. When Microsoft build Windows NT they used the extention DLL for their
--
Jerry Feldman