Involved Plugin System for Rust

Originally designed for KSL, ended up scrapped.

Objective

The objective is to build a lightweight and fast plugin system for Rust that is capable of loading modules during runtime. Due to the involved nature of this project it's unlikely to become a Rust module of any kind.

Performance

Benchmarks are run on exclusively dispatch time. Does not include time required to load dll(s) and extract registered functions.

Function	Min	Avg	Max	Iterations
math.ceil_f	10.263 µs	10.297 µs	10.331 µs	250
math.floor_f	9.5970 µs	9.6225 µs	9.6502 µs	250
math.cos_f	11.515 µs	11.560 µs	11.616 µs	250
math.sin_f	11.102 µs	11.126 µs	11.152 µs	250
math.tan_f	11.739 µs	11.774 µs	11.812 µs	250
math.sqrt_f	9.9137 µs	9.9399 µs	9.9673 µs	250

See /benches/benches.rs & /src/plugins/math.c for Reference

Roadmap

• Dynamically update function index on the C side.
• Track Plugin ID in RustPlugin struct for individually freeing plugins.
• Optimize hashmap on the Rust side.
• Crash detection to free loaded libraries.
• Add support for Linux.

Notes

Shared enums and structs are in plugin_wrapper.h.

The plugin_wrapper.h file should be included on every library.

Module loading and calling goes through plugin_handler.c which is compiled alongside main.rs with the build.rs file.

To compile the io.dll test file do gcc -c io.c and then gcc -shared -o io.dll io.o.

References

• https://docs.rs/cty/latest/cty
• https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs
• https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/interoperability/c-with-rust.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8696653/dynamically-load-a-function-from-a-dll