A dynamic Emacs module is a shared library that provides additional functionality for use in Emacs Lisp programs, just like a package written in Emacs Lisp would.
Functions that load Emacs Lisp packages can also load dynamic modules. They recognize dynamic modules by looking at their file-name extension, a.k.a. “suffix”. This suffix is platform-dependent.
This variable holds the system-dependent value of the file-name extension of the module files. Its value is .so on POSIX hosts and .dll on MS-Windows.
Every dynamic module should export a C-callable function named emacs_module_init
, which Emacs will call as part of the call to load
or require
which loads the module. It should also export a symbol named plugin_is_GPL_compatible
to indicate that its code is released under the GPL or compatible license; Emacs will signal an error if your program tries to load modules that don’t export such a symbol.
If a module needs to call Emacs functions, it should do so through the API (Application Programming Interface) defined and documented in the header file emacs-module.h that is part of the Emacs distribution. See Writing Dynamic Modules, for details of using that API when writing your own modules.
Modules can create user-ptr
Lisp objects that embed pointers to C struct’s defined by the module. This is useful for keeping around complex data structures created by a module, to be passed back to the module’s functions. User-ptr objects can also have associated finalizers – functions to be run when the object is GC’ed; this is useful for freeing any resources allocated for the underlying data structure, such as memory, open file descriptors, etc. See Module Values.
This function returns t
if its argument is a user-ptr
object.
Emacs calls this low-level primitive to load a module from the specified file and perform the necessary initialization of the module. This is the primitive which makes sure the module exports the plugin_is_GPL_compatible
symbol, calls the module’s emacs_module_init
function, and signals an error if that function returns an error indication, or if the use typed C-g during the initialization. If the initialization succeeds, module-load
returns t
. Note that file must already have the proper file-name extension, as this function doesn’t try looking for files with known extensions, unlike load
.
Unlike load
, module-load
doesn’t record the module in load-history
, doesn’t print any messages, and doesn’t protect against recursive loads. Most users should therefore use load
, load-file
, load-library
, or require
instead of module-load
.
Loadable modules in Emacs are enabled by using the --with-modules option at configure time.
Copyright © 1990-1996, 1998-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Licensed under the GNU GPL license.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Dynamic-Modules.html