摘要 |
This invention relates to management of a computer application. In particular it relates to the optimization of an application which is written for more than one platform. There is disclosed apparatus, program code and a method for resolving a program code module (such as a DLL) in a computer platform, said method comprising: loading a module into memory; locating specified operation code within the module; selecting a DLL patch for the operation code; and modifying the operation code with the patch according to DLL methods. The operating system uses the dynamic module loader to patch operational code into an application to optimise the application for that operating system and platform. It reduces the need to create a different application for each platform and operating system combination. The operation code is pointed to by a module header fix up location pointer. The above solution causes the code to be patched at load time and advantageously by the operating system itself. All the application program has to do is to ensure that the appropriate DLL exporting the right instruction sequence is installed. Additional benefits are that the code remains non-writable and cannot be corrupted, there is no call-return overhead. Furthermore there is faster execution, in the single processor example, the only overhead is one nop instruction.
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