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18.5 User Module Loaders
While writing the module loading code for GNU M4 1.5, I found that
libltdl did not provide a way for loading modules in exactly the way I
required: As good as the preloading feature of libltdl may be, and as
useful as it is for simplifying debugging, it doesn't have all the
functionality of full dynamic module loading when the host platform is
limited to static linking. After all, you can only ever load modules
that were specified at link time, so for access to user supplied modules
the whole application must be relinked to preload these new modules
before lt_dlopen will be able to make use of the additional
module code.
In this situation, it would be useful to be able to automate this
process. That is, if a libltdl using process is unable to
lt_dlopen a module in any other fashion, but can find a suitable
static archive in the module search path, it should relink itself along
with the static archive (using libtool to preload the module),
and then exec the new executable. Assuming all of this is
successful, the attempt to lt_dlopen can be tried again -- if the
`suitable' static archive was chosen correctly it should now be
possible to access the preloaded code.
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