Windows XP是否具有等效于已安装VAX / VMS的共享映像？

Question

Back in the good old/bad old days when I developed on VAX/VMS it had a feature called 'Installed Shared Images' whereby if one expected one's executable program would be run by many users concurrently one could invoke the INSTALL utility thus:

$ INSTALL

INSTALL> ADD ONES_PROGRAM.EXE/SHARE

INSTALL> EXIT

The /SHARE flag had the effect of separating out the code from the data so that concurrent users of ONES_PROGRAM.EXE would all share the code (on a read-only basis of course) but each would have their own copy of the data (on a read-write basis). This technique/feature saved Mbytes of memory (which was necessary in those days) as only ONE copy of the program's code ever needed to be resident in VAX memory irrespective of the number of concurrent users.

Does Windows XP have something similar? I can't figure out if the Control Panel's 'Add Programs/Features' is the equivalent (I think it is, but I'm not sure)

Many thanks for any info

Richard

ps INSTALL would also share Libraries as well as Programs in case you were curious

Answer 1

The Windows virtual memory manager will do this automatically for you. So long as the module can be loaded at the same address in each process, the physical memory for the code will be shared between each process that loads that module. That is true for all modules, libraries as well as executables.

This is achieved by the linker marking code segments as being shareable. So, linkers mark code segments as being shareable, and data segments otherwise.

The bottom line is that you do not have to do anything explicit to make this happen.