Plugin System without rebuilding for each OS?

Question

I'm making a game that will allow content development and I'd like it to be sort of a DLL based system. But, my game works for Linux (X86 arch) , Mac OSX and 32 bit Windows. Is there a way I could allow content developers to compile only one thing and have it work based on the platform? I fear it might get confusing if there are 3 versions per plugin. What could I do?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can decide to use a cross-platform scripting environment like Lua for plugins. This is essentially what most cross-platform games do.

Answer 2

Unless things have changed drastically since I last looked at cross platform development if you are using c/c++ you need to compile and link for the operating system you are going to execute on.

So if you want to run on 3 operating systems you need 3 binaries.

Answer 3

You could possibly use LLVM as a middle ground if you want C or C++ plugins. Have plugin devs ship LLVM assembly/bytecode, and use LLVM's runtime code emission to compile it to native code when you load it.