Dear,

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003 18:19:54 +0100,
Martijn Tonies wrote :

> Question: Does Win9x take a path into account when loading libraries?

According to MS Platform SDK and the last time I tested on Win98 SE
(last week) : yes. Note that if the FBCLIENT load fails, it is wise to
try to load GDS32.DLL the classical way. As my code sample suggest to
do.

> If you want to load 2 copies of "fbclient.dll" for different instances,
> does it work?

Simultaneous running of distinct instances of Firebird is not yet
fully supported. FB 1.5 GDS32.DLL will only attempt to load the
instance named "DefaultInstance" which is the only one the FB 1.5
setup tool will ever setup.

But the path is drawn in the registry to allow a later release of FB
to really support simultaneously running, perfectly distinct /
isolated instances.

Work still has to be done to have the server and client use the
instance name to distinguish global inter-process resources, so that
multi-instances don't clash on each other.

And of course, some new mechanism will have to be introduced so that
client & tools applications will be able to tell FBCLIENT with which
instance they want to work.

Now to more closely answer your above question, you will have
difficulties to load at the same time potentially very different
FBCLIENT.DLLs in a same application memory space. It's feasible, but
care has to be taken. If loading them with a specific PATH that should
work. I did so in the past with something different than Firebird DLLs.
If you don't specify a path to LoadLibrary(), then you just can't
(because it will 'think' it has already loaded the DLL). For sure,
these are issues for when FB will actually pretend to support
multi-instancing.

--
Best Regards,
Olivier Mascia
http://www.ibpp.org