>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.
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). 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.
