An experiment in pluggable image processing pipelines in Go, using RPC and shared memory.

I wanted to see if its possible to have some sort of dynamically-loadable plugin system in Go for a photo processing tool that I have in mind.

Go rather famously links everything into a single application binary and doesn't do the whole dynamically loadable thing, so traditional shared-library approach wont work. Go 1.5 has relaxed this restriction somewhat but for various reasons it's still not up to having a plugin interface (see the Go Execution Mode design document for more info).

This is an experiment in trying to bypass this restriction by implementing plugins as completely independant processes that signal over some sort of RPC channel, and use shared memory of some sort to transmit large data buffers to each other.

Will it be possible? Even if it is possible, will it be fast enough? Is it even a good idea? I don't know. Hence the experiment.

• A pluggable image processing filter architecture with tools to support writing filters easily
• A crashing plugin should not affect take down the host process.
• Should be fast enough to apply a stack of basic operations to an image without inconveniencingthe user. Not sure what actual metrics to use for this.