Dynamic Functions

Question

Ok, well I have sorta of an odd situation. I have a two applications. One is the main application and the other is a helper bundle that is loaded during run time. What I want to do is to call a function defined within the main application from the bundle so that code does not have to be copied over. I have tried setting the header declaration for the function

   NSString *TXReadableTime(NSTimeInterval date, BOOL longFormat);

within the helper bundle, but it still fails to compile. This is because one of my selectors is calling the function and the compiler is not finding it within the code. Only the header reference.

So I guess what my real question is, is there a way to have dynamic functions? One that is promised to the compiler, but is handled by a separate process. The helper bundle itself is allocated into memory so it has access to selectors of the main application, but I do not want to rewrite the function into a selector because it would require a lot of work.

Answer 1

Use -bundle_loader linker flag to specify the executable which will load the plugin. See ld man page, another Apple doc, and this informative blog post.