Boost C++ Libraries

...one of the most highly regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the world. — Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards

Chapter 12. Boost.DLL

Renato Forti

Antony Polukhin

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

Table of Contents

Motivation

Getting started

Tutorial

Plugin basics
Factory method in plugin
Searching for a symbol in multiple plugins
Linking plugin into the executable
Symbol shadowing problem (Linux)
Executing callbacks on library unload
Querying libraries for symbols
Advanced library reference counting
Importing a C function from Windows dll

Mangled Import

Support & Requirements
Mangled Import Example
Class Import
Overloading qualifiers

Missuses

Reference

Shared Library Reference
Shared Library Refcountable Reference

Limitations

Exporting weak symbols (Fails on MinGW, Android)
User defined section names (Fails on SunOS + Oracle Solaris Studio Compilers)
Thread safe library loading (Fails on FreeBSD, MacOS, iOS and some other)
Nested Function Definitions

F.A.Q.

Design Rationale

ABI portability across compilers
User's plugin API
Performance and memory allocations
Self loading
Aliases vs Mangling

Dependencies

Revision History

Acknowledgements

Motivation

Adding a specific features to an existing software applications at runtime could be useful in many cases. Such extensions, or plugins, are usually implemented using Dynamic Library Modules (DLL,SO/DSO) loaded at runtime.

This library was designed to simplify plugin development using C++ in a portable cross-platform manner.

Library provides a portable across platforms way to:

load libraries
import any native functions and variables
make alias names for C++ mangled functions and symbols
query libraries for sections and exported symbols
self loading and self querying
getting program and module location by exported symbol