Next: Exporting Ada Entities, Up: Building DLLs with gnatdll
When using Ada DLLs from Ada applications there is a limitation users should be aware of. Because on Windows the GNAT run time is not in a DLL of its own, each Ada DLL includes a part of the GNAT run time. Specifically, each Ada DLL includes the services of the GNAT run time that are necessary to the Ada code inside the DLL. As a result, when an Ada program uses an Ada DLL there are two independent GNAT run times: one in the Ada DLL and one in the main program.
It is therefore not possible to exchange GNAT run-time objects between the
Ada DLL and the main Ada program. Example of GNAT run-time objects are file
handles (e.g. Text_IO.File_Type
), tasks types, protected objects
types, etc.
It is completely safe to exchange plain elementary, array or record types, Windows object handles, etc.