What's the problem with dlopen and dlclose? Or LoadLibrary/FreeLibrary on Windows? Loading and unloading shared libraries is a perfectly normal thing to do, the

What's the problem with dlopen and dlclose? Or LoadLibrary/FreeLibrary on Windows? Loading and unloading shared libraries is a perfectly normal thing to do, there's no issue with it. Where it may get complex is if you want to have new and old versions active simultaneously - then you'd need to be careful about namespacing and symbol scoping. But you didn't mention what language the rest of your server is written in. If you read the paper, it talks about Truffle/Graal, which is a compiler system that JIT compiles AST interpreters. So if you're working on the JVM, you could instead write (or reuse) a simple interpreter for your expression language that uses the Truffle annotations, and switch to the GraalVM as your JDK. Then it'd get faster automatically and you don't have to think about compilers, shared libraries or whatnot. Of course you don't need Truffle. For a simple language you could also generate bytecode and load that into a classloader. It's not particularly complex. But if you want to stick with C then I'd just go ahead and load/unload shared libs on the fly. Just make sure you don't unload one whilst a thread is still inside it.