Linker and Libraries Guide

Lazy Loading of Dynamic Dependencies

You can defer the loading of a shared object dependency until the dependencies first reference, by establishing the object as lazy loadable. See Lazy Loading of Dynamic Dependencies.

For small applications, a typical thread of execution can reference all the applications dependencies. The application loads all of its dependencies whether the dependencies are defined lazy loadable or not. However, under lazy loading, dependency processing can be deferred from process startup and spread throughout the process's execution.

For applications with many dependencies, lazy loading often results in some dependencies not being loaded at all. Dependencies that are not referenced for a particular thread of execution, are not loaded.