$w/modules/arch-survey.text initial revision

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

folks,

below is a 10-minute stab at plug-in overview.  it is obviously
incomplete, for which your help would be greatly appreciated.  feel free
to suggest additional attributes, and if you have some familiarity w/ a
system, association of those attributes to the system.  WWW links and
additional systems are also welcome.  (perhaps this whole file can be
substituted w/ a link!)

note that i'm not looking for implementation technologies although using
those technologies could be an attribute (e.g., "uses libltl").

thanks,
thi


_____________________________________________________________
arch-survey.text --- overview of plug-in architectures


The idea of "module system" is often extended to include loading into the
system functionality provided by shared-object libraries or the like.  The
idea is that the Scheme programmer can consider these libraries in similar
vein as Scheme modules.

Systems that support this usage are called "plug-in" because "standard binary
interface for extension" is too much to say, and the analog of an electrical
plug (simple, standard, widespread) is typically the goal.

This file is a collection of plug-in architectures that we've encountered,
and some notes about them, organized around these attributes:

 00 -- namespace translation is 2 phase
 01 -- namespace translation is 3 phase
 02 -- has hook
 03 -- is hooks based
 04 -- depends on env vars
 05 -- passes through env vars prefixing
 06 -- passes through env vars modifying in some weird way
 07 -- unloadable
 08 -- part of PROGRAM feature list
 09 -- build plugin program available
 0A -- requires filesystem direct mapping
 0B -- uses libltdl
       [your attributes here]

See last page for WWW links.


- Apache

- Perl

- Python

- Linux Kernel

- Emacs

- XEmacs

- GIMP

- ACL



WWW links