# Compiling

This section talks about the different things you can do when building and shipping your applications and plugins.

## Embedding static elements in your application

The Plugin Writer's Guide describes in great detail how to write elements for the GStreamer framework. In this section, we will solely discuss how to embed such elements statically in your application. This can be useful for application-specific elements that have no use elsewhere in GStreamer.

Dynamically loaded plugins contain a structure that's defined using `GST_PLUGIN_DEFINE ()`. This structure is loaded when the plugin is loaded by the GStreamer core. The structure contains an initialization function (usually called `plugin_init`) that will be called right after that. It's purpose is to register the elements provided by the plugin with the GStreamer framework. If you want to embed elements directly in your application, the only thing you need to do is to replace `GST_PLUGIN_DEFINE ()` with a call to `gst_plugin_register_static ()`. As soon as you call `gst_plugin_register_static ()`, the elements will from then on be available like any other element, without them having to be dynamically loadable libraries. In the example below, you would be able to call `gst_element_factory_make ("my-element-name", "some-name")` to create an instance of the element.

    /*
     * Here, you would write the actual plugin code.
     */

    [..]

    static gboolean
    register_elements (GstPlugin *plugin)
    {
      return GST_ELEMENT_REGISTER (my_element_name, plugin);
    }

    static
    my_code_init (void)
    {
      ...

      gst_plugin_register_static (
        GST_VERSION_MAJOR,
        GST_VERSION_MINOR,
        "my-private-plugins",
        "Private elements of my application",
        register_elements,
        VERSION,
        "LGPL",
        "my-application-source",
        "my-application",
        "http://www.my-application.net/")

      ...
    }

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