Ulrich Drepper - glibc maintainer, Red Hat

TUTORIAL: How to write Shared Libraries

While programming of applications in the Unix environment is already challenging, the addition of dynamic shared objects (DSOs, aka shared libraries) complicates the situation even more. Programming techniques which are perfectly valid in normal applications would cause problems in DSOs. These problems manifest themselves in the form of performance penalties and increased resource (memory, etc) use.

The tutorial will explain the problems in detail and from the ground up. It will introduce the various programming techniques and old and new features of the various tools involved to help reduce the costs.

The low-level discussions will use the most wide-spread architecture, x86, and the programming language will be C, though the results can be applied to other architectures and programming languages that allow low-level programming.

The target audience is every programmer. Programming experience is a must and some experience with low-level programming is beneficial but not required.

A paper by Ulrich on this topic is available