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Make my application extendable by "mods"? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Examples of what I mean by modding:

minecraft mods: add some jar file into your mod folder
skyrim mods: add some .esp file into your mod folder
luanti: put some folder with .lua files and config into your .minetest/mods folder

Mods are basically "turing-complete" and can add different types of computation to your application, while integrating with the (GUI) system.

How to design a program that allow for modding?

With interpreted programming languages like python or lua, you can load code as strings at runtime … but is it done that way for these languages (that would be really bad for security)?

eval("print('mod loading ...')")

So roughly how I imagine modding in python to work, a demo in the python repl …

>>> items = {}
>>> newmod = """
... {"name": "holy-mod-sword", "value": 10, "do-damage": lambda x: x.firedamage(1000)}
... """
# loading the mod
>>> items["holy-mod-sword"] = eval(newmod)
>>> items
{'holy-mod-sword': {'name': 'holy-mod-sword', 'value': 10, 'do-damage': <function <lambda> at 0x7f8c710a9d00>}}

is it done that way or similar?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think as soon as you add mods to your application that can bring their own code with them you have a potential security issue. The most secure approach that I have seen is wasm mods/plugins run in a sandbox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Turing completeness and making functions, which can be used in combination of choice, available to the modder is a security nightmare I guess (basically your game becomes a simple operating system by making it programmable). I heard web-assembly allows for "sandboxing" but that depends on the hook functions that you allow your modder to access as well ….

But web-browsers seem to do it fine with their APIs.