Load multiple copies of dll in same process
c++, dll, multithreading, process, windows
Solution
Unfortunately, the NT core DLL loader routines don't expose a public interface to skip the pool of already-loaded DLLs. As such, you're left with just a few choices:
- Copy, hardlink, symlink, and/or use reparse points to fool the loader into thinking you have multiple distinct DLLs.
- Use multiple processes, and load one DLL per process.
- Write a new DLL loader (very much not for the faint of heart!)
- Convince the DLL's vendor to fix it (likely to be harder than writing a DLL loader :)
Problem
I have a dll produced by a third party that has some sort of internal datastructure that limits it's size to X elements. So basically, it has a Queue with X as the limit. Now from what I've known DLL's are per process, but is it possible to load a DLL more than once? Maybe per thread? In C#? or in C++/CLI? I'm trying to load a native c++ dll.