Well no. It pcalls, and catches the error. That can't possibly be as fast as just calling dlsym straight. (which is how you check for symbols at runtime => I'm not sure what the issue is) Is dlsym not available on windows? – Fjölnir On Jul 30, 2012, at 19:50 , Cosmin Apreutesei <cosmin.apreutesei@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Couldn't you just call dlsym and check for a nil result? > > That's what the check() function does, albeit in a portable fashion. >