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Microsoft to End DLL Confusion

MankyD writes "ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft is attempting to do away with DLL version conflicts in its next version of Windows with a technology it calls 'Strong Binding'. When new programs attempt to overwrite old versions of DLL's, the Strong Binding will index the DLL's and allow the programs to reference them by a unique ID, rather than by file name. Hopefully it will prevent a new program from breaking an old one. I would think this might add to DLL clutter however."

7 of 630 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Auto-DLL Managment? by pinkUZI · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    ...by default an application will always run against the component that it was built and tested against. Administrators will be able to override these rules for exceptional cases.

    Not, really. The text above is from the article. I know I have to tell you that because you don't know how to click a friggin link and read a goddamn fucking article. But now I've sumarized it for ya.
    k?
    Good... glad to help, fucknut.

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  2. It's a poor substitute for a real operating system by ites · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Dynamic load libraries are a hack to save memory. No serious developer is happy relying on DLLs that can be arbitrarily swapped in and out. A serious operating system (and I'm thinking of something like VMS) demand-swaps process images into memory so that the actual executable size is pretty irrelevant. The fact that Windows stupidly loads the entire .exe is shoddy design from the start, DLLs are a cheap and nasty work around, and this is just one more misguided patch that ignores the real problem.
    Applications should be statically linked. They should install into private directories so that they do not interfere with each other. If there is a need to reduce application size to save memory, the answer is to write better code that does not simple link the entire known universe into the executable.
    Clearly the result of this approach is going to be one set of DLLs per significant application, each loaded, and essentially the same as a set of statically linked applications. It sucks.
    It is thankfully a moot discussion - Windows is already dead and like a seventy-five year old man with terminal liver failure, is fighting by transplanting organs. The move to the commodity OS (Linux) has become unstoppable.
    Now... if there was a way to stop those nasty shared libraries on Linux...

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  3. Where do we get these people from? by corebreech · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Just statically link the library and be done with it!

  4. Re:Again? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    > I suspect in 10 years time, .net will be as bloated and as quirky to use as Win32.

    Yes, probably.

    But in 10 years time, there won't be any Linux.

  5. Like Unix but with more Cruft (TM) by binary_life · · Score: 3, Flamebait

    Unix has had library versioning from the very beginning. Shared library filenames specify what version of the shared library the file contains, and when programs load they can request a specific version thru the file name.

    And here comes M$ taking the same idea, and adding a point of failure in the form of some binary index of dlls. Jeezz this is just another thing I'm gonna have to fix when my windows friends start having trouble with thier computer. Really unnecessary. Couldn't they have just outright copied the Unix method? At least then they would have done it right.

  6. A simpler solution by mwood · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Wouldn't it be a lot easier for Microsoft to teach their people to design things before coding them, so that they don't wind up releasing incompatible updates all the time? IBM came up with this kewl new thing called backward-compatibility -- maybe Microsoft should ask them about it?

  7. Re:Auto-DLL Managment? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Hahaha. Give me a break. Do you really think MS gives enough of a crap about WINE to fundamentally change the way shared libs are handled on their system to break it?

    WINE is a piece of garbage.