[JDEV] Scripting/Modules/Rant

[Tim Lesher]

> I'd like to suggest something that a lot of people won't like :)
>
> If we allowed loadable modules (.so,.dll) and standardised on an
interface,
> with standard hooks, we could do some impressive things, atleast
> with some clients.

This is a very good idea, if it's not taken to absurd extremes (I've worked
on projects that did both).  I'm most familiar with the Windows end of it,
so I'll address it from there.  From Windows, it's no problem at all--in
fact, the majority of the Windows operating system is implemented in exactly
this way.

> There would be some standard changes to make to code so it would
> compile as an .so on *nix and a .dll on Win32, but if we offered a
> template then some enterprising souls could then design server modules,
> or even client to client stuff, without having to worry about supporting
> their code change in each of the code bases.

Again, excellent idea.  I'm not terribly familiar with the issues on the
*nix end, but it's certainly been done successfully before (cf zlib,
info-zip, etc).  In C/C++, it's all done with the smoke and mirrors of the
preprocessor and platform-specific makefiles.

Writing a Win32 interface to handle plugin DLLs is no big deal; what is
involved in *nix?

--
Tim Lesher
mailto:timl at epix.net