18. Using GNU libltdl

Now that you are conversant with the mechanics and advantages of using dynamic run time modules in your projects, you can probably already imagine a hundred and one uses for a plugin architecture. As I described in the last chapter, there are several gratuitously different architecture dependent dynamic loading APIs, and yet several more shortcomings in many of those.

If you have Libtool installed on your machine, then you almost certainly have libltdl which has shipped as part of the standard Libtool distribution since release 1.3.In this chapter I will describe GNU libltdl, the LibTool Dynamic Loading library, and explain some of its features and how to make use of them.