Cantabile Development Blog

Isolated Plugins

One of the advantages of using jBridge to host mismatched plugins between x64 and x86 is the isolation that it provides. That is, when an x86 plugin is running in the x64 version of Cantabile and it crashes, it won't bring down the entire Cantabile process. The plugin's external hosting process will die, but you can recover by simply unloading and reloading the plugin.

Previously Cantabile wasn't able to use jBridge to load a plugin for the same platform. Ie: x86 Cantabile could bridge to x64 plugins and vice versa, but you could use jBridge to load an x86 plugin in the x86 version of Cantabile.

To get the recoverability benefits of this external hosting of plugins, Cantabile now supports running plugins a special Isolated mode. If you've got jBridge installed, simply right click on the plugin and choose "Run Isolated":

If you don't have jBridge installed, selecting this option will silently fail and not do anything - I'll probably clean that up later.

This is still very experimental and as such it's not yet in the official build but available from the new Experimental Downloads page.

Posted on July 14, 2009

Share This