plugins - Does Rust have a dlopen equivalent

Question

Does Rust have a way to make a program pluggable. In C the plugins I create are .so files that I load with dlopen. Does Rust provide a native way of doing the same thing?

Answer 1

The Rust FAQ officially endorses libloading. Beyond that, there are three different options I know of:

• Use the shared_library crate
• Use the dylib crate.
• Use std::dynamic_lib, which is deprecated since Rust 1.5. (These docs are no longer available in version 1.32; it's likely the feature has been dropped altogether by now.)

I haven't tried any of these, so I cannot really say which is best or what the pros/cons are for the different variants. I'd strongly advise against using std::dynamic_lib at least, given that it's deprecated and will likely be made private at some point in the future.