In This Chapter

To link a static library, the linker copies the library functions to the executable of your ESQL/C program. The static Informix general libraries allow an ESQL/C program on computers that do not support shared memory to access the Informix general library functions.

To link a shared library, the linker copies information about the location of the library to the executable of your ESQL/C program. The shared Informix libraries allow several applications to share a single copy of these libraries, which the operating system loads, just once, into shared memory.

The thread-safe versions of Informix general libraries allow an ESQL/C application that has several threads to call these library functions simultaneously. The thread-safe versions of Informix libraries are available as both static libraries and shared libraries.