Re: Plugin System for DDD as Doctoral Thesis?

[Andrew Gaylard]

Christian Hattemer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> since DDD has all support code for the various debuggers built into the main
> binary and that code spilled in a number of places with ugly switch()
> blocks I thought it would be nice to create a plugin system and refactor the
> support code for each debugger into a separate plugin. This way all the
> code for a single debugger would be in one place, separated from unrelated
> code. This would make it easier to maintain the main DDD code and the
> debugger support code as well as adding support for new debuggers. To do
> this one would just write a new plugin, instead of touching dozens of
> places adding case labels.
>
> What do you think? Has there been anything going on in this direction in the
> past or even right now?
>
> I've already asked a professor about his opinion if this subject could be
> discussed in a doctoral thesis. Nothing is definite yet, but it sounds
> interesting.
>
> Bye, Chris

Yes, this is indeed the right way to go.  It would take several months of
work, perhaps more than a year, depending on the skill and experience of
the person doing the work.

What is needed more than a plug-in system is a proper refactoring of the
code where C++'s dynamic typing and inheritance is used to replace those
many case statements;  common code would be factored into base classes;
and so on.  Only once that is in place would it make sense to consider
moving the new derived classes into loadable shared libraries (plugins).

If you need any more ideas, please ask.  As someone who's spent time in
the ddd code, I have plenty of them...

Andrew.