On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 2:30 AM, Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net>wrote:

> >On a system that supports dynamic linking this is trivial.
>
> it's usually error prone, for instance there's no type checking,
> and dangerous: the main application crashes each time a plug-in blows a
> fuse,
> because dynamically loaded things are simply read in to the same protection
> domain.
>

Which is why Google's Chrome runs different tabs in different contexts, to
help prevent bringing down the whole browser due to plugin fragility.


>
> in your particular applications, on modern hardware, i shouldn't think
> have trouble with the overhead of connecting separate processes,
> especially the instant messenger one, but with care in design the
> mediaplayer should work too. after all, in both cases you can't
> send faster than the network, and in the latter you can't display
> faster than humans can see it, so there's quite a bit of slack.
> the main problem in the latter is maintaining a steady flow
> (the EDF scheduling might help you there).
>

The multi-process/service approach makes better use of multiple cores in an
OS than a traditional plugin architecture might with a single thread of
execution.


>
> having said that, plan 9's loader has got support for creating dynamically
> loaded things,
> with type checking. there's a supporting library that provides a reasonable
> interface to it, but that's not part of the distribution.
> if there's not already a copy somewhere i'll dig it out again.
>
> Pretty interesting :-)