Advice sought on plugin approaches

[Edwin Young <edwiny entropic co uk>]

Hi,

I've been thinking about making a fractal generation program (probably
using "gnofract" as a basis) and I've been wondering how best to store
the different fractal algorithms. Gnofract currently has an extremely
primitive scheme (essentially, if fractaltype==1) drawmandel() else
drawjulia()). I'd like people to be able to write their own functions
and add them without recompiling the main program, and I'm wondering how
best to achieve this. Is CORBA the way to go, or is it overkill? The
main other alternative I've considered is to dlopen() shared libraries
containing the fractal generation code. Also, would the marshalling
impose an unacceptable overhead if I make a CORBA call to calculate each
point? (The alternative is to pass an array of points to calculate and
return an array of results). Anyway, any suggestions would be gratefully
recieved. Also, if there's any code out there which does a similar sort
of thing, a pointer would be really useful. 

Thanks in advance,

--
Edwin Young