I wrote a YouTube downloader recently and I made an observation: While it is rather easy to dynamically load libraries during runtime, writing statically linked software that makes it easy to add new “libraries” (classes) is rather complicated. There seems to be no obvious way in most programming languages to automatically embed all files in a certain directory.

My original plan was to simulate the default behavior of Go: Adding a new site to the list of supported sites would only require to add one file, the compiler would pick it up automatically. In Rust (yes, I am a software masochist, why do you ask?), this won’t work: I’ll still need to specify the new module in another file. (Arguably, this is already a relatively easy approach, but it took me a while to figure it out.)

So I wonder why most languages don’t have Go’s “plug-in” compilation system that wouldn’t require additional files. Is this really an unusual use case?