How to pass C++ object to NPAPI plugin?

Question

I'm writing an NPAPI plugin in C++ on Windows. When my plugin's instantiated, I want to pass it some private data from my main application (specifically, I want to pass it a pointer to a C++ object). There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to do this. Am I missing something? I can't simply create my object in the plugin instance, since it's meant to exist outside of the scope of the plugin instance and persists even when the plugin instance is destroyed.

Edit:

I'm using an embedded plugin in C++ via CEF. This means that my code is essentially the browser and the plugin. Obviously, this isn't the way standard NPAPI plugins behave, so this is probably not something that's supported by NPAPI itself.

Answer 1

There is no way to do this via NPAPI, since the concept doesn't make sense in NPAPI terms. Even if you hack something up that passes a raw pointer around, that assumes everything is running in one process, so if CEF switches to the multi-process approach Chromium is designed around, the hack would break.

You would be better off pretending they are different processes, and using some non-NPAPI method of sharing what you need to between the main application and the plugin.