Dynamic Linker

The names in Base.Libdl are not exported and need to be called e.g. as Libdl.dlopen().

dlopen(libfile::AbstractString[, flags::Integer])

Load a shared library, returning an opaque handle.

The optional flags argument is a bitwise-or of zero or more of RTLD_LOCAL, RTLD_GLOBAL, RTLD_LAZY, RTLD_NOW, RTLD_NODELETE, RTLD_NOLOAD, RTLD_DEEPBIND, and RTLD_FIRST. These are converted to the corresponding flags of the POSIX (and/or GNU libc and/or MacOS) dlopen command, if possible, or are ignored if the specified functionality is not available on the current platform. The default flags are platform specific. On MacOS the default dlopen flags are RTLD_LAZY|RTLD_DEEPBIND|RTLD_GLOBAL while on other platforms the defaults are RTLD_LAZY|RTLD_DEEPBIND|RTLD_LOCAL. An important usage of these flags is to specify non default behavior for when the dynamic library loader binds library references to exported symbols and if the bound references are put into process local or global scope. For instance RTLD_LAZY|RTLD_DEEPBIND|RTLD_GLOBAL allows the library’s symbols to be available for usage in other shared libraries, addressing situations where there are dependencies between shared libraries.

dlopen_e(libfile::AbstractString[, flags::Integer])

Similar to dlopen(), except returns a NULL pointer instead of raising errors.

RTLD_DEEPBIND

RTLD_FIRST

RTLD_GLOBAL

RTLD_LAZY

RTLD_LOCAL

RTLD_NODELETE

RTLD_NOLOAD

RTLD_NOW

Enum constant for dlopen(). See your platform man page for details, if applicable.

dlsym(handle, sym)

Look up a symbol from a shared library handle, return callable function pointer on success.

dlsym_e(handle, sym)

Look up a symbol from a shared library handle, silently return NULL pointer on lookup failure.

dlclose(handle)

Close shared library referenced by handle.

dlext

File extension for dynamic libraries (e.g. dll, dylib, so) on the current platform.

find_library(names, locations)

Searches for the first library in names in the paths in the locations list, DL_LOAD_PATH, or system library paths (in that order) which can successfully be dlopen’d. On success, the return value will be one of the names (potentially prefixed by one of the paths in locations). This string can be assigned to a global const and used as the library name in future ccall‘s. On failure, it returns the empty string.

DL_LOAD_PATH

When calling dlopen(), the paths in this list will be searched first, in order, before searching the system locations for a valid library handle.