On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 2:30 AM, Charles Forsyth <[email protected]>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 :-)
