Resolving the exported symbols from a Symbian DLL

Symbian OS optimizes DLL program code to save ROM and RAM space, by offering only "lookup by ordinal" and not "lookup by name".

Symbian OS does not offer “lookup by name” because this adds an overhead to the size of the DLL (storing the names of all the functions exported from the library is wasteful of space). Instead, Symbian OS only uses link by ordinal, which has significant implications for binary compatibility.

If we are loading a DLL dynamically and need to resolve a exported function address, we need to use the following RLibrary API, which takes an integer parameter representing the ordinal number of the exported function.

TLibraryFunction RLibrary::Lookup(TInt anOrdinal)

Luckily, as part of POSIX for Symbian (P.I.P.S), widely known as Open-C library, we can achieve “lookup by name” with a Symbian DLL.

This is possible only if the library is built as STDDLL.

This allows us to have the POSIX like behavior for resolving the exported DLL symbols even on Symbian. Following POSIX like APIs can be used on Symbian provided the DLL is built as STDDLL.

void *dlopen(const char *filename, int flag);
void *dlsym(void *handle, const char *symbol);
void dlclose(void *handle);

An example with source using the PIPS libraries is here.