Golang，在Linux中加载Windows DLL

Question

Our vendor provides DLL, which works on Windows. Is this possible to load custom xxx.dll file and use its functions in Linux using Go?

Like this: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WindowsDLLs

Answer 1

The short answer is "no": when you "load" a dynamic-linked library, it's not only actually loaded (as in read from the file) but linked into the address space of your running program — by the special means provided by the OS (on Linux-based systems, at least on x86/amd64 platforms that's an external process; on Windows, it's an in-kernel facility, AFAIK). In other words, loading a dynamic-linked library involves quite a lot of complexity happening behind your back.

Another complication, is whether the DLL is "self-contained" in the sense it only contains "pure" functions — which only perform computations on their input data to provide their output data, — or they call out to the operating system to perform activities such as I/O on files. The way operating systems provide ways to do these kinds of activities to the running processes are drastically different between Windows and Linux.

The last complication I can think of is dependency of this library on others. If the library's code is written in C or C++, it quite likely depends on the C library used by the compiler which compiled the library (on Windows, it's typically that MSVCRxx.DLL thing). (A simple example is calling malloc() or printf() or something like this in a library's code.)

All this means that most of a DLL written on Windows for Windows depends both on Windows and the C or C++ standard library associated with the compiler used to build that library.

That's not to mention that Windows DLL uses PE (Portable Executable) format for its modules while GNU/Linux-based systems natively use the ELF format for its shared object files.