I did this once years ago (on Mac OS classic). I had an mp3 player I liked for its low CPU usage, but didn't like the UI. I figured out the entry points for the mp3 decoding routines and turned it basically into a library to call from my own UI.
Virtual machines/emulators are one extreme, recreating the environment it ran in so no human examination of the particular program is necessary. The approach you describe is at the other end, using bits of programs directly in other code to do basically black-box functions that aren't worth figuring out and coding properly.
Virtual machines/emulators are one extreme, recreating the environment it ran in so no human examination of the particular program is necessary. The approach you describe is at the other end, using bits of programs directly in other code to do basically black-box functions that aren't worth figuring out and coding properly.