[fpc-devel] FPC dynamic libraries

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 8 Feb 2007, schreef Mattias Gaertner:

> Plugins. For example installing a design time package.
> Contrary to normal apps an IDE has the advantage to recompile
> if needed. So Lazarus has only a subset of the normal dyn lib problems.
> But I know, that as soon as the IDE can load packages as dynamic libs,
> programmers will use dyn libs for their apps too and probably use
> them as shared libs. And then FPC+Lazarus bug tracker will get new
> trouble. So although I only want plugins, I ask about libs in
> general.

Design a plugin binary API, dynload the plugin. It is not necessary that 
the RTL is shared for this purpose (allthough it could reduce the size).

This way you only have to keep the plugin API backwards compatible, 
and could allow binary plugins to be used with any Lazarus version. 
Keeping a plugin API compatible is very doable, unlike of the full RTL, FCL 
and LCL, which seems next to impossible to me.

Daniël