10.5 Unresolved dlopen issues

The following problems are not solved by using libtool’s dlopen support:

• Dlopen functions are generally only available on shared library platforms. If you want your package to be portable to static platforms, you have to use either libltdl (see Using libltdl) or develop your own alternatives to dlopening dynamic code. Most reasonable solutions involve writing wrapper functions for the dlopen family, which do package-specific tricks when dlopening is unsupported or not available on a given platform.
• There are major differences in implementations of the dlopen family of functions. Some platforms do not even use the same function names (notably HP-UX, with its shl_load family).
• The application developer must write a custom search function to discover the correct module filename to supply to dlopen.