Building a Shared Process

The following imake macros are used to build shared applications:

SharedUserTarget(prog, shobjs, staticLibs, 
        sharedLibs, slDeps, options)
SharedSupTarget(prog, objs, staticLibs, 
        sharedLibs, slDeps, options)
SharedCXXUserTarget(prog, objs, staticLibs, 
        sharedLibs, slDeps, options)
SharedCXXSupTarget(prog, objs, staticLibs, 
        sharedLibs, slDeps, options)

For more information on each of these macros, refer to "imake Build Rules".

The prog argument is the name of the resulting process. Other arguments are the same as the SharedLibraryTarget() macro. For the options argument, the following options are particularly useful:

• -Xlinker -soname=<name>

  Within the SharedLibraryTarget() rule, this option sets the internal soname of the library. If a library used as a dependency in a rule that builds a dynamic application has a soname defined, the executable records the soname instead of the sharedLibs argument.

• -Xlinker -rpath -Xlinker <dir>

  This option defines the runpath directory that is added to the library search path.

The following example builds a shared application named shr_app from the PIC binary object files a.o and b.o. When this process is started, the runtime linker loads the shared libraries libshared.so and libcx.u.so (if required). In the target file system, this library is located in the /libraries directory because this directory will be added to the search path of the runtime linker.

SharedUserTarget(
        shr_app, 
        a.o  b.o, ,
        libshared.so, ,
        -Xlinker -rpath -Xlinker /libraries)

As with shared libraries, it is possible to build shared applications which do not contain .o objects in PIC format. The applications are still able to use shared libraries, however the application code is not shared.