A Rust framework to develop and use plugins within your project, without worrying about the low-level details.

VPlugin: A plugin framework for Rust.

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VPlugin is a Rust framework to develop and use plugins on applications and libraries,
including but not limited to games, text editors, command line and graphical applications.

But why?

I found myself ever since starting out programming struggling to find a proper solution to creating a plugin API without copying other's code. Eventually, I decided to write my own library, which ended up becoming a fully-featured set of tools that would allow me to easily write a plugin system from scratch without having to do the same thing 1000 times.

Generally, VPlugin aims to become a low-level block in your application, where you are going to build everything else on top of. VPlugin will not create the plugin system for you; It will do the dirty under-the-hood work and give you a high-level abstraction over it.

MSRV

VPlugin officially supports only the latest stable version of the Rust language. You may be able to get it to compile on a few older versions, but do not be confused if your computer blows up or you get a ton of error messages on the console.

VPlugin's Features:

• High performance thanks to Rust's blazingly fast implementation.
• Straightforward and minimal: Won't get in your way.
• Multi-threaded: Allows you to run everything on another thread. Excludes plugins, which may use code that isn't multi-thread compatible.

Supported Languages

Generally, most compiled languages will be supported, as long as they can build as a shared object file (shared library). This means that while VPlugin itself is Rust-only for now, it's perfectly possible to write a plugin usable by VPlugin in C, C++ or even Vala. See the Plugin Specification for more details. Key requirement here is a way to export your types to those languages, which requires giving off safety guarantees and a lot of expertise.