In reply to:
We already have a plugin architecture; it's just compile-time not run-time. There are problems with run-time plugins (eg .so's) which hinder us from adding such support - mainly memory use due to symbol tables.
/me wonders...
Perhaps a halfway compromise could eliminate the symbols by linking at install time? There'd have to be a link editor on disk (unless this stuff was done it the upgrade host) and enough of a compiler back-end to write an object file (
*.o
) containing the array of plugin descriptors (one entry per module), but no extra memory overhead at run-time.
That would eliminate the need to do run-time loading of modules - unless we really expect to add and remove plugins without restarting the player...
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Toby Speight - 040103385