Abi_stable

Welcome to one of the last articles of this series! Previously, we covered how to use external dependencies to lessen the work necessary to implement our plugin system. Now that we know how to actually get started, we’ll implement it once and for all. I will personally use the crate abi_stable , but the concepts should be roughly the same for any dynamic loading method. Similarly, some of my advice is related to modifying an already existing project of large size....

Previously in this series, I covered how the plugin system could be implemented from scratch. This is a lot of work if you’re dealing with a relatively large codebase and therefore a complex interface in your plugin system, so let’s see how we can make our lives easier. I’ve been wanting to try abi_stable for this since the beginning, which was specifically created for plugins. But we aren’t really locked to that crate, so I’ll show other alternatives as well, which can even be combined to your liking....

In the last article of this series I wrote some simple experiments of plugins both with WebAssembly and dynamic loading. After discarding Wasm for this specific plugin system, I wanted to try to get a more realistic example with dynamic loading and work towards the final implementation. Since the Tremor team suggested that I began by implementing connectors, we’ll first have to learn more about them. Matthias ran me through their current state in a meeting, which I’ll try to summarize....