Exercises in Programming Style

Chapter 19

Plugins

19.1 Constraints

• The problem is decomposed using some form of abstraction (procedures, functions, objects, etc.).
• All or some of those abstractions are physically encapsulated into their own, usually pre-compiled, packages. Main program and each of the packages are compiled independently. These packages are loaded dynamically by the main program, usually in the beginning (but not necessarily).
• Main program uses functions/objects from the dynamically-loaded packages, without knowing which exact implementations will be used. New implementations can be used without having to adapt or recompile the main program.
• Existence of ...