Hi folks, may I jump into this discussion?

Once I faced a problem where I wanted to split a program too, and I remembered the old OVLs. I had a multiple modules app with a single entry point, where users could select options, do some general stuff and go to one of its modules, they could then select other modules, return to main etc.

It was somewhat interesting to do this way because the app's modules shared lots of common transactions and tables that put in that way simplified user's actions. The app had user restrictions based on login, so some modules would never be accessible to some users, thus not needing to go to memory. After all I had a big exe and the load time (from a file server) was very slow and users didn't like that (me too).

The app didn't had to load all of it's modules all the times, just the ones the users selected (or could access), so if I could split it in the main module and 15 to 20 callable submodules would be just fine. I would like to do it in a way to bring to memory just the modules needed.

Anyway, can we "split" a program into dlls whose functions could be declared and called when needed, and then freed? What about building COM Dlls? Is that possible or applicable?

Thanks