On Wednesday, 9 January 2013 at 03:05:34 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I haven't been screaming yet because (so far) I haven't gotten
to
writing applications that need dynamic loading in D. But I did
tell
myself that I will be screaming when I do get to it, because
it's a pain
to have to recompile the entire application just to add a
single addon.
Unfortunately for me, I'm getting to that point.
If there's another better way, I'd sure like to know about it!
[...]
Another way, yes. Better, I don't know. You *could* load
plugins as
separate processes and communicate via some kind of IPC
mechanism, like
Unix pipes. But that's a royal pain (requires serialization /
deserialization, with the associated overhead, and a network
stack or
equivalent, just to interface with each other).
T
The messaging concept does have some advantages. For example, if
your external "plugin" fails for any reason (for example due to a
segfault), the rest of your main application can continue
operating just fine. There are other advantages, such as
distributed processing, but if you can benefit from those
advantages depends entirely on what you are attempting to
achieve. The simplest use case that gives you a good subset of
the main advantages, is through runtime loaded plugins.
In my case, I will making use of both methods, but I really
prefer having the plug-in capability to start with.
--rt
