In the Open Computer Forensics Architecture library ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocfa/ ), a simple template sub library is used for policy loading with shared libraries. This stuff is currently buried in a large library, and it would seem prety usefull to extract this sub library into an enviroment (like boost) where it can be used within a wider scope. To show apptoximately how this sub library is used, I've taken a few lines from a part of OcfaLib that uses this functionality: The below example is used to load an implementation of the abstract TreeGraphFactory class within a loadable library "libtesttreegraph.so" with a constructor function named "constructor" in it. std::string module="testtreegraph"; //Define a type for the constructor. typedef SinglePointerConstructor< TreeGraphFactory, std::map< std::string,misc::Scalar > > CTreegraphType; //Define a type for the policy loader. typedef PolicyLoader<CTreegraphType> PLTreeGraph; //Create a new policy loader object for a given module and constructor function name. PLTreeGraph *mPolicyLoader=new PolicyLoader<CTreegraphType>(module,"constructor"); //Fetch the constructor from the policy loader. CTreegraphType *constructor = mPolicyLoader->constructor(); //Construct an object using the constructor TreeGraphFactory * mActiveFileSystem =(*constructor)(attributes); For more info, the relevant headers in the ocfa source tree are: OcfaLib/inc/misc/PolicyLoader.hpp OcfaLib/inc/misc/VoidToFunction.hpp It probably needs some work on portability and needs more constuctor templates to be fully generically usable, but I feel this has the potential to be a very usefull extention to boost. Do you people feel this should be further explored and submitted as a possible extension for boost? Rob