This section describes the general and type-specific parts of the plugin API. It also provides a step-by-step guide to creating a plugin library. For example plugin source code, see the plugin/fulltext directory of a MySQL source distribution.

You can write plugins in C or C++ (or another language that can use C calling conventions). Plugins are loaded and unloaded dynamically, so your operating system must support dynamic loading and you must have compiled mysqld dynamically (not statically).

A plugin contains code that becomes part of the running server, so when you write a plugin, you are bound by any and all constraints that otherwise apply to writing server code. For example, you may have problems if you attempt to use functions from the libstdc++ library. These constraints may change in future versions of the server, so it is possible that server upgrades will require revisions to plugins that were originally written for older servers. For information about these constraints, see Section 2.9.2, “Typical configure Options”, and Section 2.9.4, “Dealing with Problems Compiling MySQL”.