Darkhack

I'm interested in writing a program in C using GTK+ on Linux, but I wanted to know how I might go about providing developers with the ability to write extensions for my application without recompiling. This is similar to the way Firefox does extensions, although I would like for my extensions to be written in C for maximum performance. I don't have a clue about how something like this can be done. Can anyone here give a basic explanation or provide some links that show examples?

Game_Ender

There are several steps to this process:
1) Determine which functionality of your program you wish plugins to use.
2) Place that functionality into a shared library that both your program and the plugin's will link to.
3) Compile a shared library against your programs shared library
4) At runtime load the shared library with dlopen and use dlsym to look up the predefined registration function.
5) Call that registration function with whatever initial data your plugin needs to operate.
6) When you wish to unload the plugin you will have to use dlclose.

Once you have wrapped your head around that, feel free to ask questions.

Here is a short discussion with some example code.

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Robotics @ Maryland AUV Team - Software Lead

Uten

I know I'm late so for a later reference.

LUA, LUA, LUA. I know it ain't exactly what TP asked for but in the end, if he studies how LUA is implemented in an application, he will understand how to achieve extendability in his application.