[sldev] Plugin API Architecture for Second Life

[Ben Byer]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 8:49 PM, John Hurliman wrote:

>>
>> Is cross platform support critical?
>>
>
> I don't think it's necessary to embed a virtual machine directly  
> inside opensl, since you can always write a plugin to do that. I  
> think cross platform support is important so plugins aren't  
> restricted to only OSX users, there is a lot of people using SL  
> that aren't running macs.

Pfft.  Loading plugin code is easy -- the dlopen() / dlsym() code  
I've written will work without modification on any Posix system  
(Linux, OSX, Solaris, *BSD...).  It would (will) take at most 20  
lines of code to add support for windows.

Once you've loaded plugin code into the client's address space, the  
porting issues become the same as for the rest of the viewer -- I  
imagine that most plugins will only need to be recompiled to support  
multiple architectures.
-b