I'm experimenting with making a kind of plugin architecture for a program I wrote, and at my first attempt I'm having a problem. Is it possible to access symbols from the main executable from within the shared object? I thought the following would be fine:
testlib.cpp:
void foo();
void bar() __attribute__((constructor));
void bar(){ foo(); }
testexe.cpp:
#include <iostream>
#include <dlfcn.h>
using namespace std;
void foo()
{
cout << "dynamic library loaded" << endl;
}
int main()
{
cout << "attempting to load" << endl;
void* ret = dlopen("./testlib.so", RTLD_LAZY);
if(ret == NULL)
cout << "fail: " << dlerror() << endl;
else
cout << "success" << endl;
return 0;
}
Compiled with:
g++ -fPIC -o testexe testexe.cpp -ldl
g++ --shared -fPIC -o testlib.so testlib.cpp
Output:
attempting to load
fail: ./testlib.so: undefined symbol: _Z3foov
So obviously, it's not fine. So I guess I have two questions: 1) Is there a way to make the shared object find symbols in the executable it's loaded from 2) If not, how do programs that use plugins typically work that they manage to get code in arbitrary shared objects to run inside their programs?