Re: dynamic linking

Uwe Ohse <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 11:14:21AM -0400, Paul Jarc wrote:
>> If you want to exchange structured data with other code, and you're
>> communicating with that code via pipes, then you must use parsing
>> (when reading) and quoting (when writing) to serialize the data over
>> the pipe.
>
> No. It's easier than that: You just pass a byte counter and the data.

It isn't that easy when the structure contains references to other
structures.

>> OTOH, with shared libraries, you can just pass pointers to
>> structures; no serialization is needed.
>
> You can't pass pointer between applications. Shared libraries under unix
> share code, not data. This is not windows.

Consider "stat(filename, &statbuf)" where stat lives in a shared
libc.  filename and &statbuf are pointers to data from the program.
The stat function can access the pointed-to data because for this
call, it runs in the same address space as the program.


paul