I've been trying to develop a dynamic library in C++ that can be run-time loaded in an application. I finally got it working, but it's a little ugly. I have a function that takes a pointer to a C++ class as an argument, which looks like this:
bool registerGrindPlugin( Grind::PluginManager* mgr );
But of course it's being exported as:
_Z19registerGrindPluginPN5Grind13PluginManagerE
I tried a .c file with a simple function and it exported fine as "registerGrindPlugin", but of course I can't pass a C++ class as the argument that way.
So... my question is, is there a way to unmangle or alias the exported symbol so that I don't have to use a monstrosity like Z19registerGrindPluginPN5Grind13PluginManagerE in my dlsym call?
I did see something about -alias_list as a linker option, but I haven't quite figured out how to use it in Xcode. If that is the solution, can somebody provide some more details on how to use this?
Usually, plugin interfaces are defined with c-naming and calling conventions. Name mangling is potentially compiler dependent (non standard).
So the easiest solution is to define some interface function and declare that as extern "C":
extern "C" {
bool registerGrindPlugin( Grind::PluginManager* mgr );
}
You may have to replace the Grid::PluginManager with a void* type and an internal cast. This has to be a simple structure, rather than a class with virtual functions.
If you do insist on dealing with mangled names you can take a look at the source code of 'c++filt' which is a gnu utility that is also available on OS X.