Q: Is dlopen available on all versions of Mac OS X?A: Prior to version 10.3, dlopen was only available for Mac OS X as a third party library called dlcompat. In order to better support the compilation of various software projects on Mac OS X, Apple rolled dlcompat into the operating system in Mac OS X 10.3. Then for Mac OS X 10.4, Apple rewrote dlopen and integrated it into the dyld project. Consequently, dlopen, dlclose, dlsym, and dlerror are all implemented using dyld calls. Software written using a higher level framework in most cases should use the dynamic linking facilities available at that level. Core Foundation provides two mechanisms for dynamically linking to libraries and plug-ins: CFBundle and, layered on top of that, CFPlugIn. Cocoa programmers will probably want to use NSBundle. Document Revision History| Date | Notes |
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| 2006-05-11 | Moved to Darwin>Porting category. | | 2005-12-02 | Changed title and content to reflect dlopen's inclusion in Panther and beyond. | | 2002-08-19 | Describes how to dynamically link to libraries and plug-ins, typically done with dlopen. |
Posted: 2006-05-11
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