11 Using libltdl

Libtool provides a small library, called ‘libltdl’, that aims at hiding the various difficulties of dlopening libraries from programmers. It consists of a few headers and small C source files that can be distributed with applications that need dlopening functionality. On some platforms, whose dynamic linkers are too limited for a simple implementation of ‘libltdl’ services, it requires GNU DLD, or it will only emulate dynamic linking with libtool’s dlpreopening mechanism.

libltdl supports currently the following dynamic linking mechanisms:

• dlopen (POSIX compliant systems, GNU/Linux, etc.)
• shl_load (HP-UX)
• LoadLibrary (Win16 and Win32)
• load_add_on (BeOS)
• NSAddImage or NSLinkModule (Darwin and Mac OS X)
• GNU DLD (emulates dynamic linking for static libraries)
• libtool’s dlpreopen (see see section Dlpreopening)

libltdl is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, with the following exception:

As a special exception to the GNU Lesser General Public License, if you distribute this file as part of a program or library that is built using GNU Libtool, you may include it under the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.

This document was generated on December 1, 2011 using texi2html 5.0.