Support plugins explicitly loaded at runtime

[frutiger]

A plugin explicitly loaded at runtime is a dynamically loadable module that exports some set of symbols. Other code may then load and use those symbols using operating system provided facilities (e.g. dlopen or LoadLibrary) if it knows the names and types of the exported symbols.

These dynamically loadable modules would have to be deployed together with the code using them in order to avoid mismatched symbol names and symbol signatures/behaviours.

This would implement option (1) from #7.

[frutiger]

I believe this is supported on the plugins branch (at 0a7237d). @cppguru, please let me know if that branch provides support for this kind of plugin, thanks!

[cppguru]

I think the support was not fully there, because it was not possible to
depend on what's inside a plugin without getting it into the link line. I
may remember wrong.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 2:53 AM, Masud Rahman notifications@github.com
wrote:

I believe this is supported on the plugins branch (at 0a7237d
0a7237d).
@cppguru https://github.com/cppguru, please let me know if that branch
provides support for this kind of plugin, thanks!

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#12 (comment).

[frutiger]

Ah yes, you are right, that support is still not there, however it should be relatively simple to add, I'll see what I can do.

[cppguru]

Thanks!

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Masud Rahman notifications@github.com
wrote:

Ah yes, you are right, that support is still not there, however it should
be relatively simple to add, I'll see what I can do.

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#12 (comment).

[frutiger]

It's possible that ce6613f fixes this issue. The tests would indicate so, but I have yet to actually build something with it!

[frutiger]

It is currently considered out of scope for bdemeta to support understanding dependencies between libraries at runtime. Note that code may load a dependency at runtime as usual, there is no magic provided by the build system to automatically switch between a library loaded at runtime vs. linked against at link time.