Re: Dumb DLL Question

["Rehan Ahmad" <ahmadr@eee.bham.ac.uk>]

Furthermore, what if you need to produce more than a single executable that
use a number of common functions to both. If you opt for Fat-Executable
model then you are unnecessarily repeating most of your binary code and
wasting hard-disk space of the users.

This is quite obvious in Windows itself, whose most of the functions,
services, and other reseources are made available for other developers to
exploit and use to their liking. Imagine what if every program has to
statically link with Win32 API ... Or worse still if there was no Win32 API
(which is actually only a collection of DLLs)...

In BCB3 this concept has been further refined into 'Packages' which are
special dynamic link libraries (*.BPL). They are designed to share code
among several parts of the Builder IDE, to integrate the custom components
with the IDE, and to share (VCL) code among the components. Their main
advantage is therefore with the VCL based code.


Rehan