Shared library tricks

Notes

on the topic of shared libraries, i thought id just mention an idea close to my heart.

there are linux and solaris calls dlopen and friends that allow you to at runtime from inside your own code open explictly a shared library and execute the code found there, theres an example in the dlopen manpage. so for instance you could have a widget library that consists of a scrollbar shared library, a button shared library etc, and the program rather than being linked to these libraries actually expliclty opens the button shared lib and runs the button stuff, so from a menu you could select which of multiple button libs, each with a utterly different look and feel that you want your program to use. pretty snazzy eh ?

the point of this mail though is that its bitch difficult to do this with c++, when you open the lib with dlopen in c you basically search for a function named for instance foo and then run it, with c++ if you had a function named foo, then compiled to a lib foo becomes due to name mangling foo_int23qwe_ug_addh or some other nonsense, so you cant just find the function you want with dlsym when c++ does its bizz to it, and if you want to get a handle to an object etc you might as well piss against the breeze, but there is a way out of the problem if you have one c call protected with extern C in the shared lib that returns a pointer the the object. now the name doesnt get mangled so you can find it with dlsym, and you get a handle to the pointer so you're off. of course as the program you call dysym from isnt actually linked to the program it wont actually have any knowledge of the object being passed to it, so you cant use the object unless you have a common parent class that the shared lib inherits from and that is visible to the dlopen code. so what you have now is a parent class definition that the code using dlopen has included, and that the object that the extern C protected call in the shared lib will return is based on so you can use the baby. from the dlopen calling code the only methods you can call directly on the returned objects are ones that had definitions in the base class, this is a big limitation, but it still allows a mechanism where a program can at run time with c++, swap in and out widget modules, change the style of buttons its using at the drop of a hat, any program using such a lib would be fully configurable. Im not too sure whether something like this is of any use, but its a damn cool idea. It all works pretty well in theory, and a sample chunk code that demonstrates the basic code for the concept is at http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/pub/c++dl ive also gotten it to work with cygnus's windows library as well, so the same thing is possible under windows.

Caolan McNamara (1998) <caolan@skynet.ie>

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