Re: [boost] Is there interest in dynamically loadable classes?

From: Thomas Matelich (sosedada_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-07-18 11:54:48

Martin Reinecke wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'd like to find out if there is any interest to include the
> DLC library for dynamically loadable classes into Boost.
> This library allows loading and unloading of different implementations
> for abstract classes at runtime in an easy and type-safe way.

One of the things I like about boost is the way it takes things and makes them super
cool.  Things like the operators and tokenizer and others, where I've done things
before and the solution provided by boost is so much more extensible and complete, it
makes you smile when you look at the code.  What I'm trying to get at is that there
are so many options you need to consider.

Do you enforce a base class?  How do the loadable classes inform the loading
application what tools they provide?  Do you want to implement something as structured
as COM?

I have taken over maintenance of SOMELib (somelib.sf.net, use CVS), and ported it to
Windows.  It has tried to be a very simple framework, no required base classes, no
UUID's.  The tradeoff here is that the host app has to do a bit more work setting up
the system.  On the other hand its a lot more flexible than something like COM.

I haven't looked at your API, but the DLC::New seems interesting.

Back to boost, I think it could be an interesting project, but I would like to see the
same level of coolness developed.

Other interesting implementations:
Qt 3 will have a Plugin/Com library (www.trolltech.com)
XPLC (xplc.sf.net)
XPCOM (www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom)

--
Thomas O Matelich
Senior Software Designer
Zetec, Inc.
sosedada_at_[hidden]
tmatelich_at_[hidden]