dyld stands for
dynamic
loa
der.
It is a
programmatic interface to the
linker/
loader for the
Mach-O object code file format.
Under
Mac OS X dyld is also a
dynamic link editor.
Programs that are ready for
dyld are not actually linked. They are more/less a bunch of
object files lazily
merged together.
Dyld figures out all the specifics of the
Mach-O module and
resolves all the
symbol dependencies.
For example:
If you
compile a standard
ANSI C program, most of the
dependencies dyld would need to resolve would regard the ones to the standard C
library which is located in the
system framework.
dyld is much more sophisticated than any other currently available
loader. You can, for example, specify your object not to be
memory protected.
dyld can choose not to link a chunk of program at all, if it feels it should be
memory savvy. It can also, choose to load up whole
frameworks into memory and everything they are
dependent on, in coordination with the
Mach microkernel.