Is there a better way to load a dll in C++?

Question

Right now I do something like this and it seems messy if I end having a lot of functions I want to reference in my DLL. Is there a better and cleaner way of accessing the fu

Answer 1

When you build your dll, you should also get a lib file that you can link with. That will do the heavy lifting in the background for you. Include the header file that you've created, but change into dllimport instead of dllexport. You can use a define for that, so that for your dll project it uses dllexport and all others that do not use this define will use dllimport.

You only need to do a manual LoadLibrary and the typedef if you want to dynamically load the dll yourself. If you do the above approach your exe will fail if the dll is not present.

You can also build the dll project into a static library and load that instead, which will also get rid of that problem but will increase the size of your exe. This is of course not an option if you really want it to be a dll.