3plib.txt

开放源码的编译器open watcom 1.6.0版的源代码

Just a short note to explain the workings of 3PLIB.EXE to anyone interested in
playing with CauseWay DLL's.

CauseWay's DLL loader now has the ability to find modules (a DLL) within a
larger combination of modules. As an example, if you have one DLL that deals
with file I/O called FILEIO and another that deals with memory allocation called
MEMORY, you could do: copy /b fileio.dll + memory.dll system.dll . Now the file
system.dll contains both FILEIO & MEMORY and CauseWays DLL loader will still be
able to find both of them. They are still independant of each other, ie, if
only FILEIO is imported in a program then only the FILEIO module will be load'd
into memory.

All that's happening here is that when the DLL module finder opens a file and
finds a CauseWay 3P header, if the module name it finds isn't the one it's after
it moves past the 3P section of the file and starts again. If the next part of
the file is a CauseWay 3P header it'll look in that and do the same thing again
until it finds the module it wants. This process also extends to skipping the
stub loader used in CauseWay programs so a stand alone EXE can also have
additional modules appended to it.

3PLIB simply automates the copy /b process and generaly makes life simpler when
trying to deal with multiple module files. You can add a module, update an
existing one, delete a module, extract (copy) a module, list all module
names and exported symbols, and generate an import object to build an import
library. What you effectively wind up with is a library of DLL modules which
are much more dynamic in use than a standard DLL and neater than lots of small
DLL files.

Remember that all you're dealing with here is a bunch of CauseWay files appended
to create one big file.


If you run 3PLIB without any comands you'll see something like this:

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