MT4 Library

I'm sure that question has been asked already, nevertheless I did not find an answer... so here is my question...

For the purpose of reusability I've written some MQL-Libraries. Later when compiling an EA/Indicator/Whatever which uses this library, what happens to the function calls?

Or in another way: Is a library only linked or is it compiled into this EX4-File? Are there any directives where you can choose wether to link or to compile?

The library is linked dynamically. You can replace the library with a newer version without recompiling the EA and it will be used when the EA is restarted. This is the only advantage of using libraries.

I am using include files for the purpose of code reuse instead. This has the disadvantage that after every change to the include file I must recompile all EAs using it but it will produce one statically linked .ex4 without any dependencies that can be easily distributed.

there is another thing that is not so obvious about .ex4 libraries, it is documented somewhere deeply hidden in the reference manual: If you load the same library from two different EAs it will load the library twice! Unlike the normal shared DLL loading mechanism of windows you will always have multiple instances of the same library in memory, the consequence is that it will behave exactly like a statically linked program. You cannot share the same resources (variables, file handles, etc.) across multiple EAs using the same library. It will always behave as if a copy of the code was statically linked into every EA.

This strange behavior is another reason why i decided to go with include files only. I cannot have the behavior of shared libraries with .ex4 libraries anyways, so why mess with the overhead of having to maintain two files (header and implementation) for every library if i will end up with something that behaves exactly like statically linked anyways? I just put the whole implementation into the header file (the include file) and don't use a library at all. The only drawdown is that I have to re-compile all EAs when I make changes to my "library" but the advantage is that I don't have to maintain separate header and implementation files and I can easily distribute the compiled EA as one single file without any dependencies.

hello. I was watching ichimoku strategy and you you wrote an ex-lawsuit . I demand you you would be able to write an ex-lawsuit to me? elöre I say thank you for your answer. according to it plain profit ex-lawsuit would be .
many thanks janos

Unfortunately I did not understand one word you said...

Hmm..can you rephrase what you said...