Handmade Hotreloading (by dll swaping)

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I the past week I put together very quickly a working prototype for a game framework that hot-reloads both code and assets, losely based on the handmade aproach (https://youtu.be/WMSBRk5WG58?si=oHDSAOOzF-2e0PoM).

I has a bootstrap.exe, core.dll and game.dll.

The bootstrap is responsible to loads both the code and game dlls and to reload the later when it changes, the core.dll is imutable it can not be reloaded because it holds global state comming from libraries such as raylib, imgui… The game.dll is linked against core.dll and where all the game logic resides, pretty standard sutff.

Now the trick part, I developed a zig framework that I wish to use instead of raylib and the only way I know to make this work is by exporting all of my functions, and to make all structs extern and then write zig bindings for my zig lib :confused:

Is there any other way of consuming a zig shared library from zig without needing to export symbols?

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export and extern(on decls) are for cross object exposing and using symbols. pub and @import only work within an object, not across multiple.

And zig doesnt have a stable abi, so you have to wrap that aswell, usually you’d use the c abi, which is the default.

you dont have to make everything compatible with the abi, only the exposed api needs to be, and that can just be a wrapper over the zig api