Re: DSO Terms Galore

On Jul 23, 2024, at 07:26, Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org> wrote:

> Things like "object" or "object file" or probably wrong-ish. I understand an object file to be a .o file, which you can't dlopen directly.

Agreed.

Another option, however, is “dynamically shared object” (DSO), which corresponds to the usual *nix extension, .so. I think I know the term most from Apache. It’s curious that I didn’t run across it while perusing the Postgres docs.

> I think we can unify this around terms like "dynamically loadable library" and "dynamically loadable module" (or "loaded" in cases where it's talking about a file that has already been loaded).

+1 for “dynamically loadable module” and, in common usage, “module”, since I don’t think it would be confused for anything else. “dynamically loadable library” would either have to always be used in full --- because “library” can be static, too --- or to “DLL”, which has strong Windows associations.

Best,

David