Static Library - An Introduction

Static library is a group of object files bundled together in an archive by the archiver program. The static libraries have a .a extension.

Advantages
1. The executable is not dependent on any library as the library code is included in the binary
2. In some cases performance improvement

Command for creating a static library

ar rcs -o libmylibrary.a file1.o file2.o file3.o

Steps for generating the static library libemployee.a for the Employee Program written in the previous post

1. Compiling source files to object files

g++ -Wall -c -fPIC -O -I. -o Employee.o Employee.cpp

2. Command for building the archive file libemployee.a

ar -rcs -o libemployee.a Employee.o

Read more ...

Shared Library - An Introduction

A shared library is a library required by an executable to run properly. Such executables are called incomplete executables as they call routines present in the shared library code. The executables generated from the shared library are smaller in size than the ones generated from a static library

When an executable built with shared library is run, the dynamic loader identifies the list of dependent libraries to be loaded and searches for them in the standard default locations and the locations pointed to by the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux), SHLIB_PATH (HP-UX), LIBPATH (AIX)

Shown below is the Employee class which we will use to generate the shared library libemployee.so

 1 #ifndef _Employee_H_
 2 #define _Employee_H_
 3 
 4 //File: Employee.h
 5 
 6 #include <iostream>
 7 
 8 class Employee
 9 {
10   public:
11       Employee();
12       Employee(const std::string name, int age);
13       virtual ~Employee();
14 
15       //Modifiers
16       void setName(const std::string name);
17       void setAge(int age);
18 
19       //Accessors
20       const char* getName() const;
21       int getAge()          const;
22 
23   private:
24       std::string m_name;
25       int m_age;
26 };
27 
28 #endif //_Employee_H_

 1 #include "Employee.h"
 2 //File: Employee.cpp
 3 
 4 Employee::Employee()
 5 {
 6 }
 7 
 8 Employee::Employee(const std::string name, int age)
 9 {
10     m_name = name;
11     m_age = age;
12 }
13 
14 Employee::~Employee()
15 {
16 }
17 
18 void Employee::setName(const std::string name)
19 {
20     m_name = name;
21 }
22 
23 void Employee::setAge(int age)
24 {
25     m_age = age;
26 }
27 
28 const char* Employee::getName() const
29 {
30     return m_name.c_str();
31 }
32 
33 int Employee::getAge() const
34 {
35     return m_age;
36 }

Compiling the Employee source files to object files

g++ -Wall -c -fPIC -O -I. -o Employee.o Employee.cpp

Linking the object files to generate the shared library libemployee.so

gcc -o libemployee.so Employee.o -shared -fPIC -Wl,-rpath,. -L. -lstdc++

Read more ...