[gigel82]

How does this work with dynamic libraries (shared objects). In Windows land, you get a .lib with a .dll and afaik that has hardcoded function addresses. You statically link the "import library" .lib with your exe, so if you randomize the function addresses and rebuild just the .dll later, it blows up (you need to rebuild all exes as well).

Is dynamic linking in Unix world truly runtime-only (a-la "GetLibrary" / "GetProcAddress")?

[account42]

Unix/ELF doesn't have seperate .lib and .dll files - you link directly against the .so (or a linker script, but those are typically only used for special system libraries). The main thing this does is record the name from the DT_SONAME field of the .so as a requied dependency in your binary.

But I also don't think that this would be a problem on Windows. After all, you can generally replace DLLs with entirely different versions and you'll be fine as long as all the required symbols are present and ABI-compatible.

The main difference between ELF and PE dynamic linking is that with PE you have a list of required symbols along with the libraries to load those symbols from while with ELF you have a list of required libraries and a list of required symbols but not information recorded about which symbols should come from which libraries.