> Another possibility, of course, would be to spawn a separate process for the smoothing operation, which would effectively replace software fault isolation wit

> Another possibility, of course, would be to spawn a separate process for the smoothing operation, which would effectively replace software fault isolation with hardware fault isolation. But this might be awkward (and slow), which is why few modeling software packages do this. I do agree this is a much better model, and it doesn't have to be particularly slow or painful. An example system that does this well is XPC on macOS [1]. The nice thing is by defining a good service model is you can also run your third-party plugins the same way - with full process-level privilege isolation - and in the event of a crash the service can simply be restarted. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/CreatingXPCServices.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...