Is it possible to dynamically load a @safe function from a shared library ?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 06:11:01PM +0000, wjoe via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Friday, 13 March 2020 at 17:05:32 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> > On Friday, 13 March 2020 at 16:11:53 UTC, wjoe wrote:
> > > On Friday, 13 March 2020 at 16:04:06 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
[...]
> > > > bindSymbol(cast(void**)&apiVersion, "VersionOfAPI");
[...]
> This also means that LoadPlugin() can't be @safe - or at least the
> call to bindSymbol.
[...]

Of course it cannot be @safe, because it depends on whether the symbol
defined in the library you loaded is actually @safe.  You cannot know
that for sure (for example, maybe it exports a symbol that happens to
coincide with the mangling of a @safe function, but isn't in fact
@safe).  Similarly, at least on Posix, shared libraries only export
symbol names, the actual type is not part of the shared library API
other than what is encoded in the mangled symbol.  So you don't know for
sure that you're actually casting to the correct type, for example; if
you make a mistake, you might get UB and memory corruption.

So essentially, you're trusting that the symbol you just looked up is
actually pointing to what you think it's pointing to.  Therefore, it
makes sense that such calls have to be @trusted.


T

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