Selene-Core

Selene is designed to be extensible through the use of plugins, in the form of compiled libraries and lightweight python interfaces that provide configuration for the selene-sim frontend. We achieve this through this selene-core crate and python module.

Each plugin should comprise a python component and a compiled library component. The compiled library implements the Selene plugin API, and the python component provides configuration, link information and the path to the compiled library to the selene frontend.

The selene-core python module provides interfaces for plugins to adhere to. It also provides a bundled include directory, containing C headers for the Selene plugin API for each type of component.

To access the C headers in the build stage of a python package, depend on selene-core as a build dependency and call selene_core.get_include_directory(). The resulting path can be provided to a build system for C or C++ and the plugin APIs can be included through:

#include <selene/simulator.h>   # for the simulator API
#include <selene/error_model.h> # for the error model API
#include <selene/runtime.h>     # for the runtime API

Each header defines a descriptor structure and a packed current-version constant:

• SELENE_SIMULATOR_CURRENT_API_VERSION
• SELENE_ERROR_MODEL_CURRENT_API_VERSION
• SELENE_RUNTIME_CURRENT_API_VERSION

Populate struct_size with sizeof the descriptor, use the corresponding version constant for api_version, and populate every function pointer that is not documented as optional. A plugin must export either the descriptor symbol documented in its header or, preferably, the accessor function. For example, a simulator plugin should export:

static const SeleneSimulatorPluginDescriptorV1 descriptor = {
    .struct_size = sizeof(SeleneSimulatorPluginDescriptorV1),
    .api_version = SELENE_SIMULATOR_CURRENT_API_VERSION,
    /* function pointers */
};

const SeleneSimulatorPluginDescriptorV1 *
selene_simulator_get_plugin_descriptor_v1(void) {
    return &descriptor;
}

The equivalent runtime and error-model accessor names are declared in their respective headers.