A Study of Plugin Architectures for Supporting Extensible Software - Mike Shah

cppnorth.ca/
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A Study of Plugin Architectures for Supporting Extensible Software - Mike Shah
Building extensible software is a goal and often a metric of good software design. It is becoming increasingly common for users to contribute to the development of the software they use--especially in the domains of computer graphics and gaming. Terms like 'modding' software have been around since at least the early 90s when the popular game Doom allowed users to create their own content and modify the program's behavior. Behind these programs there thus must be a mechanism for allowing users to 'hook' into the main program. In this talk, I will be showing several software developer kits including Autodesk Maya 3D (C++), Unity3D (C#), Unreal Engine (C++), and QT Modeler(C), and present a case study of how they are designed. At the end of the design discussion, I will present how to get started building your own plugin system, and what considerations must be taken in mind (e.g. does the application or plugin manage resources, what should be exposed in the API, how do you embed a scripting language, and how should you distribute your plugins). Attendees will leave the presentation with practical knowledge of how to build software that can be extended by their user base.
Slides: github.com/Cpp...
Sponsored by:
think-cell: www.think-cell...
JetBrains: www.jetbrains....
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Mike Shah
Professor / (occasional) 3D Graphics Engineer
United States
Mike Shah is currently a teaching faculty with primary teaching interests in computer systems, computer graphics, and game engines. Mike's research interests are related to performance engineering (dynamic analysis), software visualization, and computer graphics. Along with teaching and research work, Mike juggles occasional consulting work as a 3D Senior Graphics Engineer in C++ and producing programming content at his UA-cam channel / @mikeshah
CppNorth is an annual C++ conference held in Toronto, Canada.
Annual CppNorth C++ conference: cppnorth.ca/
CppNorth Twitter: / cppnorth
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