Re:An alternative to shared libraries (2008)
by _bxg1 on Monday June 25, 2018 @06:58PM
(#17396548)
These days I mostly work in JavaScript, and say what you will about NPM, at least it provides a consistent, reliable, central strategy for retrieving and organizing external dependencies (assuming you haven't just built them into your bundle). The same is true of Maven for Java, to some extent. It seems like at least in Linux, the package manager will get your DLL's for you and coordinate all that, but as far as I can tell there's nothing similar for Windows? Do Windows programs that rely on DLL's just have to manually check what's already there, whether it matches their needs, and copy files over during the installation process if necessary?
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Re:An alternative to shared libraries (2008)
by stagger87 on Monday June 25, 2018 @07:51PM
(#17396846)
I develop small to medium size Windows applications. It's much easier for me to simply put all the DLLs I need in the installer. Just copy everything into the installation directory. Since Windows looks in the immediate directory first, that eliminates most potential conflicts. There are some things you might install onto the system like C++ redistributables, but even recently I have just started copying those DLLs into the installation directory too. Most people like this because the application directory is fully standalone and can be copied around from PC to PC.
Which totally defeats the purpose of dll's, right? I'm not judging; this just seems like a pretty condemning argument against the practice as a whole