Many modern Linux application systems make extensive use of dynamically loadable object modules (plugins). However, most of these systems implement their plugin and interface management systems in a way that satisfies their own immediate needs, and is not generally directly usable by other projects.

PILS is an generalized and portable open source Plugin and Interface Loading System. PILS was developed as part of the Open Cluster Framework reference implementation, and is designed to be directly usable by a wide variety of other applications. PILS is available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Since it is written in C, and built with automake and libtool, it is portable to most modern operating systems. PILS manages both plugins (loadable objects), and the interfaces these plugins implement. PILS is designed to support any number of plugins implementing any number of interfaces.

This paper describes the philosophy and goals of PILS, presents an example of how to use PILS, and discusses a few implementation details of the PILS system.

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