Note that this is how things were done before dynamic linking was invented, and dynamic linking was seen as a big step forward. Processes+shared memory is a re

Note that this is how things were done before dynamic linking was invented, and dynamic linking was seen as a big step forward. Processes+shared memory is a really painful and slow paradigm compared to just invoking function calls on the same stack and in the same process. "a bad plugin won't crash or corrupt your own process." It still can. The plugin just has to return bad data you're not prepared to handle, or crash in a way you didn't anticipate and code around. And note that with higher level languages the whole thing is moot. A plugin crashing just means it throws an exception which can be caught, reported and quite likely the host process will survive just fine even though it's all in-process and dynamically loaded.