It's very on the Mac to create a loadable plugin as a bundle and make it use symbols in the Host executable. How can this be done on Linux and Windows?
I hear there's -rdynamic on Linux that may come in handy but I'm completely at a loss as far as Windows goes.
The point is to move away from linking both the host and the plugin against a shared library and towards a statically built host.
You may want to use a slightly different model for Windows. If using a cross platform framework, you should be able to IFDEF this in.
LoadLibrary function allows you to pass the name of a DLL to it as a string. You can then get the address of various functions within the Library by their name and point them at a function pointer.
A plugin model I often see is to call an initialization function in the plugin, passing it a structure or class that contains function pointers in the host executable.
Just to make sure I understand, you want to be able to dynamically load and unload plugin DLLs which will automagically resolve symbols that are defined only in the host application, correct? I don't think this is possible under Windows (I don't know about Linux). One option would be to move the host functions into a shared static library that everybody links to, but this probably isn't possible because it needs to provide host-specific functionality. I think the only viable option is Zan's approach.
There is a way to accomplish this, apparently, but it relies on a hard-coded dependency to the host executable.