Re: [gtk-list] gmodule

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, Marcus Brubaker wrote:
> Are there any places were documentation or example code is available for
> this?  Are there any programs currently using this?  Plus, if someone
> could give me a basic idea of what it is for and how it might be used I
> would appreciate it.  Thanks.
> 

The 'testgmodule' program in the gmodule directory is pretty much a
comprehensive example. 

It's a dlopen wrapper, so the dlopen man page would probably be
enlightening. Basically you open a shared library and you can access
symbols in the library. For example, if you opened libgtk.so you could
ask for "gtk_widget_new" by name, get a pointer back, and call the
function via the pointer.

It's useful to write plugins, for example. Each plugin can be a shared
lib. I'm using it in Guppi (http://www.gnome.org/guppi) version 0.0.2
which will be out RSN. (the one currently on the web site does not use
it.)

Havoc