[Lazarus] FYI: Shared Libraries support

[Razvan Adrian Bogdan]

On Linux they used the OS abilities and naming rules to prevent a dll
hell, since a typical Linux system contains at least twice (usually
much more) the number of libraries and applications than your windows
machine, if you have a 64 bit Linux you will see how nice libs are
placed and with simple symlinks and version in .so names, there are
absolutely no naming conflicts, still with all binaries in one place
it manages to avoid the dll hell and make everyone happy.
I assume OSX also played it smart but OSX had more planning in the first place.
The only platform with dll hell is windows, because it didn't support
any type of links until NTFS hard links that few know about or use, on
windows Borland was smart enough to include versions in their .bpl
files for each Delphi version, maybe M$ should have folowed the
example  instead of inventing a squared iron wheel covered in rubber
named an "assembly" that tricks your app into dynamically loading
whatever dll the user wants you to load, can't we implement such
mechanism ourselvs.
I like the way Zeos Components make use of such dynamic loading and
use different dlls and could even have multiple versions of the same
dll loaded at once and change between those at runtime, it is a simple
as creating a record structure holding the dlls functions and making
instances of this record and dynamically loading every version of the
dll, it is even more advanced than the assembly concept because you
can chose from the application what dll to load and even use more than
one version of it. I think FPC could make dynamic dll loading using
the current static dll loading syntax or very similar syntax if you
are too lazy to write a dynamic loader but then again how much use
would it have to have almost the same syntax, maybe it would help
automatic converters.

Razvan