Guaranteeing a single copy of a shared assembly per process

A computer program product comprising:

• a non-tangible computer readable medium having a computer usable program code for accessing a version of shared assembly in a componentized environment, the computer program product comprising:
• computer usable program code for receiving a call to an assembly stub of the shared assembly, wherein multiple versions of the shared assembly exist concurrently in a single process, wherein each version of the shared assembly comprises an assembly stub and an assembly implementation;
• computer usable program code for forwarding the call from the assembly stub to an identified assembly implementation using a proxy pointer and setting a global symbol table pointer to point at a returned function table structure;
• computer usable program code for returning the function table structure from the identified assembly implementation, wherein the function table structure contains implementation symbols from the identified assembly implementation, wherein an implementation symbol becomes a unique definition utilized by an entirety of the single process when the implementation symbol is loaded into global space, regardless of any path or name of the shared assembly that the implementation symbol resides in.

A data processing system for accessing a version of shared assembly in a componentized environment, the data processing system comprising:

• a bus;
• a storage device connected to the bus, wherein the storage device contains a computer usable code;
• and
• a processing unit connected to the bus, wherein the processing unit executes the computer usable program code to receive a call to an assembly stub of the shared assembly, wherein multiple versions of the shared assembly exist concurrently in a single process, wherein each version of the shared assembly comprises an assembly stub and an assembly implementation, to forward the call from the assembly stub to an identified assembly implementation using a proxy pointer and to set a global symbol table pointer to point at a returned function table structure, and to return the function table structure from the identified assembly implementation, wherein the function table structure contains implementation symbols from the identified assembly implementation, wherein an implementation symbol becomes a unique definition utilized by an entirety of the single process when the implementation symbol is loaded into global space, regardless of any path or name of the shared assembly that the implementation symbol resides in.