Hubert Lamontagne wrote:
You'd still probably need some kind of dynamic linking for plugins.
You are right. A plugin could in principle be statically linked into the executable, but you would probably prefer third party plugins to be loaded at runtime. Maybe we need to mark functions and data in the executable as public or private, where only public symbols can be accessed by plugins. But a plugin, whether statically or dynamically linked, is still able to access everything that it can find the address of. This might be a security problem. Even if there is no malicious intent, a poorly behaved plugin that messes with things it shouldn't touch might cause compatibility problems. This is also a problem in existing systems, of course, but I would like ForwardCom to be safer. Maybe we need a system where each plugin is running as a separate thread or process where we can control its access rights? |
New idea: Re-linkable libraries in ForwardCom new - Agner - 2017-04-27
New idea: Re-linkable libraries in ForwardCom new - Agner - 2017-05-13