Can I load a 32-bit Dll library into a 64-bit version of MATLAB?

Is it possible to load a 32-bit DLL library into a 64-bit version of MATLAB? Using the loadlibrary command generates an error--are there any reasonable workarounds to this problem?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

No you cannot do it in MATLAB, and there are no reasonable work-arounds other than using a 32 bit version of MATLAB.

I don't think it is impossible in theory, as it would be similar to using a two-tape Turing Machine; two-tape Turing machines can be turned into one-tape Turing machines by expanding the symbol set to the cross-product of all symbols on each tape. But importing more than (2^32) 64-bit addresses into 32 bit address space does get somewhat dicey.

[Hannetjie]

This is the first time in my life I've seen a clarification by means of Turing machine.

[Sanjay Manohar]

This is the best answer I have ever read. To any question.

Answer 2

[Daniel Goerke]

I also need to load a 32-bit DLL into a MATLAB using loadlibrary().

Unfortunately the 32-bit family of MATLAB is not supported in the latest version: https://de.mathworks.com/support/sysreq/roadmap.html

Did any kind of workaround come up to load 32-bit DLLs in 64-bit MATLAB (R2017b or later)?

Best regards, Daniel

[Guillaume]

Please don't use the answer box for what is just a comment.

There are and never will be a workaround for this. Windows does not allow any 64-bit program to load any 32-bit dll.

If no 64-bit version of that dll exists and you cannot recompile it as 64-bit the only thing you can do is create a surrogate 32-bit exe which loads the 32-bit dll and a surrogate 64-bit dll that relay the calls from matlab to the exe through interprocess communication. This is not a trivial thing to do but is possible. As stated in the article, the work involved is probably as much as just rewriting the dll as 64-bit.