Crate dlopen

Library for opening and working with dynamic link libraries (also known as shared object).

Overview

This library is an effort to make use of dynamic link libraries in Rust simple. Previously existing solutions were either unsafe, provided huge overhead of required writing too much code to achieve simple things. I hope that this library will help you to quickly get what you need and avoid errors.

Quick example

extern crate dlopen;
#[macro_use]
extern crate dlopen_derive;
use dlopen::wrapper::{Container, WrapperApi};

#[derive(WrapperApi)]
struct Api<'a> {
    example_rust_fun: fn(arg: i32) -> u32,
    example_c_fun: unsafe extern "C" fn(),
    example_reference: &'a mut i32,
}

fn main(){
    let mut cont: Container<Api> =
        unsafe { Container::load("libexample.so") }.expect("Could not open library or load symbols");
    cont.example_rust_fun(5);
    unsafe{cont.example_c_fun()};
    *cont.example_reference_mut() = 5;
}

Features

Main features

• Supports majority of platforms and is platform independent.
• Is consistent with Rust error handling mechanism and makes making mistakes much more difficult.
• Is very lightweight. It mostly uses zero cost wrappers to create safer abstractions over platform API.
• Is thread safe.
• Is object-oriented programming friendly.
• Has a low-level API that provides full flexibility of using libraries.
• Has two high-level APIs that protect against dangling symbols - each in its own way.
• High level APIs support automatic loading of symbols into structures. You only need to define a structure that represents an API. The rest happens automatically and requires only minimal amount of code.
• Automatic loading of symbols helps you to follow the DRY paradigm.

Compare with other libraries

Feature	dlopen	libloading	sharedlib
Basic functionality	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multiplatform	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dangling symbol prevention	Yes	Yes	Yes
Thread safety	Yes	Potential problem with SetErrorMode() on older Windows platforms	No support for SetErrorMode (library may block the application on Windows)
Loading of symbols into structures	Yes	No	No
Overhead	Minimal	Minimal	Some overhead
Low-level, unsafe API	Yes	Yes	Yes
Object-oriented friendly	Yes	No	Yes
Load from the program itself	Yes	No	No
Obtaining address information (dladdr)	Yes	Unix only	No

Safety

Please note that while Rust aims at being 100% safe language, it does not yet provide mechanisms that would allow me to create a 100% safe library, so I had to settle on 99%. Also the nature of dynamic link libraries requires casting obtained pointers into types that are defined on the application side. And this cannot be safe. Having said that I still think that this library provides the best approach and greatest safety possible in Rust.

Usage:

Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
dlopen = "0.1"

Documentation

Cargo documentation

Examples

Changelog

License

This code is licensed under MIT license.

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Simonas Kazlauskas whose libloading became code base for my project.

Comparison of APIs:

• raw - a low-level API. It is mainly intended to give you full flexibility if you decide to create you own custom solution for handling dynamic link libraries. For typical operations you probably should use one of high-level APIs.

• symbor - a high-level API. It prevents dangling symbols by creating zero cost structural wrappers around symbols obtained from the library. These wrappers use Rust borrowing mechanism to make sure that the library will never get released before obtained symbols.

• wrapper - a high-level API. It prevents dangling symbols by creating zero cost functional wrappers around symbols obtained from the library. These wrappers prevent accidental copying of raw symbols from library API. Dangling symbols are prevented by keeping library and its API in one structure - this makes sure that symbols and library are released together.

Additionally both high-level APIs provide a way to automatically load symbols into a structure using Rust reflection mechanism. Decision which API should be used is a matter of taste - please check documentation of both of them and use the one that you prefer. At the moment none seems to have any reasonable advantage over the other.

Modules

• raw
  Low-level API for opening and getting raw symbols from dynamic link libraries.
• symbor
  High-level and safe API for opening and getting symbols from dynamic libraries. It is based on symbol borrowing mechanism and supports automatic loading of symbols into structures.
• utils
  Utilities for working with dynamic link libraries.
• wrapper
  High-level and safe API for opening and getting symbols from dynamic link libraries. It is based on wrapping private symbols with public functions to prevent direct access and supports automatic loading of symbols into structures.

Enums

• Error
  This is a library-specific error that is returned by all calls to all APIs.