External Interfaces

Loading and Unloading the Library

To give MATLAB access to external functions in a shared library, you must first load the library into memory. Once loaded, you can request information about any of the functions in the library and call them directly from MATLAB. When the library is no longer needed, you will need to unload it from memory to conserve memory usage.

Loading the Library

To load a shared library into MATLAB, use the loadlibrary function. The syntax for loadlibrary is

• loadlibrary('shrlib', 'hfile')
  

where shrlib is the filename for the .dll shared library file, and hfile is the filename for the header file that contains the function prototypes. See the reference page for loadlibrary for variations in the syntax that you can use.

Note    The header file provides signatures for the functions in the library and is a required argument for loadlibrary.

As an example, you can use loadlibrary to load the libmx library that defines the MATLAB mx routines. The first statement below forms the directory specification for the matrix.h header file for the mx routines. The second loads the library from libmx.dll, also specifying the header file:

• hfile = [matlabroot '\extern\include\matrix.h'];
  loadlibrary('libmx', hfile)
  

There are also several optional arguments that you can use with loadlibrary. See the loadlibrary reference page for more information.

Unloading the Library

To unload the library and free up the memory that it occupied, use the unloadlibrary function. For example,

• unloadlibrary libmx
  

Overview

Getting Information About the Library

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