I have an application for Mac OS X that supports plugins that are intended to be loaded at the same time. Some of these plugins are built on top of a Cocoa framework that may receive updates in one plugin but not another. Given Objective-C’s current method for function dispatching, any call from any plugin to a given Objective-C routine will go to the same routine every time. That means plugin A can find itself inside plugin B with a trivial Objective-C call! Obviously what we’re looking for is for each plugin to interact with its own version of the framework upon which it was built. I have been reading some on Objective-C and this particular need, but haven’t found a definitive solution for it yet.
Update: My use of the word “framework” above is misleading: the framework is a statically-linked library, built into the plugin(s) that need it. The way Objective-C handles dispatching, however, even these statically linked pieces of disparate code will co-mingle in the Objective-C dispatcher, leading to unintended consequences.
Update 2: I’m still a bit fuzzy on the answer provided here, as it doesn’t seem to propose a solution as much as an unproven hypothesis.
The best solution thus far is a derivative from the idea proposed in this question