What is embedded MetaCard (libmc.a)?
The MetaCard distribution comes with a template for calling C functions and a tutorial that explains how to use it. On UNIX systems, this standard system spawns the external C functions as a separate process and uses X properties to pass information between this external and the MetaCard engine. It is suitable for most applications that need to call C functions to access databases or specialized libraries. Due to the communication overhead, it probably isn’t suitable for applications that need to call C functions repeatedly in loops. It can also be difficult to debug externals since they’re run as separate processes, and so developing large externals can be very time consuming. To remove these limitations the MetaCard engine is also available in an embedded version on UNIX systems. This library (libmc.a) can be linked directly to applications which can call MetaCard functions with only normal function call overhead (which can be up to 40 times faster than communicating via properties),
