Can plugins add libraries to unix vm?

[tim Rowledge]

On 21-Dec-05, at 9:36 AM, Alan Sibley wrote:

> I am building an internal plugin... I can switch to external,
> it would be nice for it to work either way. I will a) try external  
> and let you know
> and b) paste in the link command from the internal makefile.
Unless you have some particular need for the plugin to be internal  
(and the only one I can imagine is a need to distribute a single file  
executable because your users ares are inexperienced) then an  
external is much easier to live with *especially* during development.
a) you can compile it individually
b) you can load it to test
c) you can unload it
d) you can regenerate and recompile it to fix the bug you found
e) you can reload it
f) see b)

Note that barring truly nasty gotchas -that I can't recall ever  
hearing about- there is nothing to stop you developing the plugin as  
an external and then finally generating it as internal for the last  
build before shipping. All the code in the 'normal' plugins works  
either way except in a couple of cases where someone has decided to  
force a fixed dependency between the core vm and a plugin - the  
security plugin on windows comes to mind.
I don't know how unices do things like linking large libraries to  
dynamically loaded libraries (which is what external plugins are) but  
I'd be astonished if you couldn't do it. On RISC OS for example the  
socket libs and so on are linked only to the socket plugin, not to  
the core vm.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
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