Duft Markus wrote:
At least on windows some information that would have been included in a static library is processed and after that discarded by the linker. For example, in a release link of a DLL there are no more symbol names (except for those that are exported - and that only when not importing by ordinal numbers), so it would be impossible to come up again with the signature for a particular (internal) function.
Yes, from the DLL itself it wouldn't seem possible to recover the function signatures, but let's suppose you do have the header files for the library.
However, Brian's argument that the DLL is fully linked, whereas a static library is just a collection of unlinked objects, seems to be a quite fundamental reason why one can't recover individual objects.
I suppose it's similarly hard as "extracting" linkable objects from an executable.
Thanks for all your input! Thomas
