You don't "open" a shared object based library, you link against it. No user code is required. The difference is at the linking stage. you add -use-dynld to the link line gcc -o myproject object1.o object2.o -use-dynld -lSDL etc etc If you want to create shared object based plugins / modules that's a bit different, you can load them at runtime using libdl, but that doesn't sound like what you are asking. If it really is what you want, say, and I'll dig an example out.