construct/ircd

IRCd Library Definitions

This directory contains definitions and linkage for libircd

Overview

libircd is designed specifically as a shared object library. The purpose of its shared'ness is to facilitate IRCd's modular design: IRCd ships with many other shared objects which introduce the "business logic" and features of the daemon. If libircd was not a shared object, every single module would have to include large amounts of duplicate code drawn from the static library. This would be a huge drag on both compilation and the runtime performance.

                           (module)   (module)
                               |         |
                               |         |
                               V         V
                             |-------------|
----------------------       |             | < ---- (module)
|                    |       |             |
|  User's executable | <---- |   libircd   |
|                    |       |             |
----------------------       |             | < ---- (module)
                             |-------------|
                               ^         ^
                               |         |
                               |         |
                           (module)   (module)

The user (which we may also refer to as the "embedder" elsewhere in documentation) only deals directly with libircd and not the modules. libircd is generally loaded with its symbols bound globally in the executable and on most platforms cannot be unloaded (or even loaded) manually and has not been tested to do so. As an aside, we do not summarily dismiss the idea of reload capability and would like to see it made possible.