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Project: Building a Modular Plugin System with Templates, CRTP & Concepts — Phase 3 Capstone

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TopicTrick Team
Project: Building a Modular Plugin System with Templates, CRTP & Concepts — Phase 3 Capstone

Project: Building a Modular Plugin System with Templates, CRTP & Concepts — Phase 3 Capstone


Table of Contents


Plugin System Architecture

mermaid

Step 1: The IPlugin Abstract Interface

cpp

Step 2: Generic PluginRegistry<T>

cpp

Step 3: CRTP Plugin Base for Zero-Overhead Helpers

cpp

Step 4: Concept Constraints on Registration

cpp

Step 5: Dynamic Loading with dlopen/LoadLibrary

cpp

Complete Plugin Implementation Example

cpp

Extension Challenges

  1. Plugin versioning: Add minimum_host_version to PluginInfo and reject plugins requiring a newer API than the host provides
  2. Dependency injection: Add register_service<T>(std::shared_ptr<T>) to the registry and allow plugins to declare dependencies via requires<T>()
  3. Priority ordering: Add an int priority() to the plugin interface and sort the execution order automatically
  4. Config file: Parse a plugins.toml file to determine which plugins to load and what config to pass initialize()

Phase 3 Reflection

Phase 3 ConceptUsed In Plugin System
Abstract interfaces (Module 11)IPlugin pure virtual contract
CRTP static polymorphism (Module 11)PluginBase<Derived> zero-overhead helpers
unique_ptr ownership (Module 6)Registry owns plugins via unique_ptr<T>
std::move semantics (Module 3)Plugin transferred into registry on registration
Templates + PluginRegistry<T> (Module 13)Generic registry works for any IPlugin subtype
Concepts (Module 19)ValidPlugin constrains registration
std::ranges::find_if (Module 15)Finding plugins by name
Variadic compile-time checksstatic_assert on plugin names

Proceed to Phase 4: Multithreading & Atomics →


Part of the C++ Mastery Course — 30 modules from modern C++ basics to expert systems engineering.