Plugin Development

There are many ways to develop plugins which provide interfaces for other languages. Some are good, some are bad, and then there are monstrosities like irssi-perl that can only be described as Cthulhu in code form. This is a list of things to keep in mind when developing language interfaces.

Do not just wrap the origin language’s plugin API. This is particularly harmful when the target language is object-oriented and the origin language isn’t.
1. Most importantly, developers shouldn’t have to program like they’re using C when they aren’t.
2. This means transparently converting between your types and the target language’s native types, just in case this wasn’t obvious.
Do not ever allow the target language to see pointers, in any form, unless that language uses them.
[to be continued]