Microsoft already provide similar technology known as virtual dlls.
It was a technology designed for MinWin.
They split functionality of dlls into ‘api sets’ These can be seen in Win 7 in the system32 dir with the prefix ‘api-ms-win-core--<num of>-1-0.dll’. WinMin components link against these virtual dlls which load up the real libs listed in apisetschema.dll.
However this involves modification to the loader.
On 13 November 2010 11:16, Timo Kreuzer
<timo.kreuzer@web.de> wrote:
I have thought about the multiple Windows version thing some time ago
and had some ideas.
One idea is to Reorganize the functionality, similar to the way it's
done in Windows 7.
some of the win32 dlls would become wrapper dlls and forwarding to the
actual implementations. These wrapper dlls would be tiny and we could
have different sets of wrapper dlls for different windows versions. They
might also forward to different implementations of the same api on
different versions if required. This could be done on runtime, with
something similar to sxs, only user configurable rather than manifest based.
So instead of importing the vista function RegDeleteTree from
kernel32.dll a wine dll would import it from something like
API-ROS-Core-Registry.dll
This way we could as well cleanup our dependency tree and layout stuff
more window 7 alike