Why Your Plugin Strategy Needs Two Different Models

The choice between in-process and out-of-process plugins is fundamentally a trade-off between performance and safety. In-process plugins offer speed and direct memory access but create a single point of failure where one crash can bring down the entire system; out-of-process plugins add communication overhead but provide true crash isolation and language flexibility. For production applications, understanding when to use each model determines whether your app's reliability depends solely on network protocols or must account for third-party code behavior.