How can I speed up loadlirbrary for a C/C++ DLL?

Our company provides a C/C++ DLL (with a pure C interface) and a MATLAB wrapper to use the functionality in MATLAB. It works quite well exept for the loadlibrary part which is very slow (up to 15 seconds depending on the pc). A customer reported that a DLL from another company is loaded much faster (only a few seconds). Another aspect I came across is that using loadlibrary for our DLL in C++ is very fast (less than one second). Of couse, MATLAB will always need more time because its a different platform. But 15 seconds are too long. We use Windows but plan to use Linux in future, too.

So my question is: how can I speed up loadlibrary of our DLL?

• How can I modify the code of our C/C++ DLL to make MATLAB's loadlibrary faster?
• Can I use MATLAB different to make loading my DLL faster?

My current code where I load the DLL is:

if(~libisloaded(c.libalias))
    try
        [notfound,warnings] = loadlibrary (dllFullFileName,headerFileName,'alias',c.libalias);
    catch ME
        errorMessage = sprintf('...');
        errorMessage = sprintf('%s\n%s', errorMessage, ME.message);
        error(errorMessage)
    end
 end

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Use the prototype file and thunk file

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/loadlibrary.html

This will prevent matlab from having to compile the interface with a compiler.

[Semjon]

Thank you. Exactly the thing I was looking for.