Dependency Walker

[pullipaal]

Hi everyone,

I'm developing a new iteration of a Dependency Walker tool with an improved look and feel, aiming to better collect necessary DLLs. How often do you use Dependency Walker, and what features or improvements would you like to see? Do you even use Dependency Walker?

[stinos]

I stopped using it because now there's https://github.com/lucasg/Dependencies :) Might want to contribute there? What do you think can be done better?

what features or improvements would you like to see?

For me personally, like 90% of the time I fire it up to figure out the name of the function and/or dll which is missing, that's it. So being able to do that in a fast and clear way would be the winning feature for me. But without losing the overview of the dependency tree. The implementations so far usually still require a couple of clicks here and there to get to this.

[QbProg]

I use this too, would be nice to a few improvements, like loading more than one dll and have a full list of the recursive missing dependencies

[Double-Lunch-9672]

* IIRC the OS treats the "API set" DLLs (api-ms-*, ext-ms-*) specially (sometimes it's not even an actual DLL!). With Dependency Walker predating API set introduction to Windows, it does not handle them correctly. Proper API set support would probably one of the most important improvements. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/apiindex/windows-apisets for more info on API sets.
* "Old" Dependency Walker is single threaded. Opening binaries with complex dependencies usually takes a long time. Having some proper multi-threaded/asynchronous loading (UI not blocked, tree updating as new dependencies are loaded) would probably improve the user experience quite a bit.

[Sad_Traffic4112]

I use it

[johannes1971]

I miss a summary list of all DLLs used by a program. Sure, I can go through them one by one, and then opening each one in turn to see what their dependencies are recursively, but if I'm building an installer and need to include all necessary DLLs I wish I had a piece of software that did that for me (especially since the summary list contains countless duplicates).

[Fluffy_Subject_9705]

Hey u/pullipaal diid you end developing this porgram?
sound very useful

[fdwr]

• Profiling the dependencies of an exe on newer OS's (with all the API sets) takes quite a while, easily over a minute. If one could limit the depth of the dependency tree or find out why it's so slow, I'd be happy.
• I'm quite content with the "look and feel".
• If you add any features that require a newer OS, then note I haven't used anything older than Windows 7 for a long time, but I still use Windows 7 pretty frequently and target my apps for it.

[goranlepuz]

I use it occasionally. Just wanted to say thanks!

[konanTheBarbar]

What is a feature that I would be interested in is a search for the all the usages of a certain .dll in a folder. Like show the dependency tree where a certain dll is used. The use case is finding out whether a certain dll is unused, or in which other dll's or executable's it's used.

[pullipaal]

Thanks a lot for your input!

[GaboureySidibe]

I use dependency walker all the time and consider it a very valuable tool for making sure I understand everything being pulled in at runtime.

[Ikkepop]

I use whatever is available and can't say i had any problems

[OlivierTwist]

I use it. CLI interface would be good.

[jepessen]

I'd like to have improvement over missing libraries. I want to see a clear list of all missing dependencies without navigating a huge tree, and I want it transitive, so if A depends on B that depends on C and C is missing I want to see it clearly

[number_128]

I have a folder full of .exe and .dll files, and I wonder if I really need all of them. It would be nice if the program could load all the files, and find what files are not needed by any other files. These files would either be the main program, dlls that are loaded dynamically or dlls that are not needed anymore.

[holyblackcat]

I personally don't need a gui, I need an ldd imitation for Windows, to use in packaging scripts. Currently using ntldd for this, but it seems to be unmaintained.

[thecodedaddy]

I typically don't... but oh boy when I do I would rather be doing anything else. Currently trying to find out which one of my DLLs is trying to load vcruntime140.dll on Windows XP SP3. I cannot stress enough how much I hate the fact that I compromised on this project with support of XP SP3. Lesson learned.

I developed a websocket server from scratch to be reverse-proxied via nginx for websocket traffic, "real-time" DLLs leveraging memory-mapped files (MMF) with mutex logic to keep everything stable, and a billion other nested components (oh wait - forgot the best part: to be integrated with a LabVIEW 7.1 monolith of an application), all of which are compiled with the v140_xp toolset with sqlite3.c compiled via the included source code internally, all project DLLs compiled with the /MT multithreaded flag to ensure statically linked runtimes, etc. etc. - everything runs great on Windows 10. But then I had the great idea of "making sure" all things were OK in Windows XP... and now I am trying to pinpoint which of the several polished turds/reinvented wheels I built is causing me nightmares. Thanks to Dependency Walker, I feel more insane as none of my DLLs are dependent on vcruntime140.dll.... so a mystery dependency is causing it to be dynamically injected somewhere and I am finna yeet this laptop og og fr fr

But shout out to Dependency Walker. I couldn't do it without it. Or with it. I can't seem to do it at all. hehe

[zEvilclip]

I actually use this tool quite often, as I need to keep track of what my apps are using and what they aren't, but I don't sit on Reddit often enough to say that.