Best practices for linking libraries (part 1)

A while ago I was looking into some application start up problems. The problem turned out to be an issue relating to the order in which the libraries were loaded and initialised. It seemed to me that this was a rather tricky area, and it would be very helpful to document the best practices around it. I thought this would be a quick couple of pages, but it turned out to be a rather high page count, and I ended up working on the document with Steve Clamage (with Rod Evans helping out).

The first part of the document is available. This section covers basic linker good practices. Using -L and -R rather than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, generating relocatable code etc. The key take aways are:

• Use -L to specify the path to where the libraries can be found at compile time.
• Use -R to specify the location of the libraries at run time.
• Use the token $ORIGIN to specify a relative path for the libraries' location. This avoids the need to have a hard-coded location where the libraries can be found.