Suppose you're writing an app such as a multiprotocol instant messenger or a
mediaplayer that supports multiple container formats and codecs. It's a good
idea for your app to have a plug-in functionality, so that plugins could be
developed independently and functionality added to the program without the
need to recompile the whole thing. On a system that supports dynamic linking
this is trivial. On Plan9 I'm not sure how to go about this. Having separate
processes interacting with the main one seems somewhat wrong to me (slower,
more overhead etc). Perhaps it's better to implement a limited form of
dynamic linking, so that modules compiled to load dynamically could be
loaded by the application that wants to load them whenever it needs. What do
you think?
