Can I change the name of an implicitly linked DLL in an already-built library?

Question

Here's my use case: I am building Python wheels on multiple platforms that contain compiled binary extensions that link to Boost. I need to bundle the relevant Boost DLLs (and a few others) in with the wheels, but I want to avoid DLL hell. On MacOS and Linux I can accomplish this cleanly with 'delocate' and 'auditwheel' respectively. On Windows I'm at something of a loss.

What I'd like to do (but don't know how to do) is change the DLL name inside the binary extension (itself a DLL), so instead of boost_filesystem.dll it would look for boost_filesystem_blargle.dll where 'blargle' is randomly determined and thus unique. Then, I include boost_filesystem.dll under the name boost_filesystem_blargle.dll and there's no chance of conflict.

I'm trying to avoid anything like delay loading that requires changing the source code of the library I'm working with -- this needs to operate as a post-build step. Also, some of the DLLs export classes, which seems to torpedo delay loading entirely.

Is this even possible on Windows?

Answer 1

See machomachomangler, which can be used to mangle the names of DLLs. Or if you want a tool that can bundle DLLs with Python wheels while mangling their names, you can try delvewheel, which uses machomachomangler internally.