[vlc-devel] Modules bank per process or per instance?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

IIRC, as of 0.8.5, the modules bank is supposed to be per-process. However, 
the way was done has always been, say, sloppy. Until 1.0, there is still a 
reference to one of the LibVLC instance in p_module_bank->p_libvlc. And even 
in 1.0, thread-safety is incomplete, in other words, not there.

So we have two options:
- fix the current design with proper locking, or
- switch to a per-instance model.

With the per-instance model, it would be possible to support different 
plugin-path, within a single process, although I believe no ne would ever use 
this feature. With the per-process model, initialization is faster, as we 
don't need to rescan the plugin paths adn reload the cache every time. We 
also spare a tiny bit of memory.

I am currently leaning toward fixing the per-process implementation. What do 
you think?

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://git.remlab.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=vlc-courmisch.git;a=summary