@techee thanks for the explanation, can you explain more what is "cork" and what it provides? This is more for understanding than directly relevant to the PR.
You pointed out the concern, is there anything that is not needed in Geany, thats in that code because ctags needs it (like for instance the stuff that outputs ctags files). I know Geany abandoned the "small and lightweight" some time ago, but this is adding two extra `editor.c`s worth of code to the executable.
I don't suppose you could get uctags to provide a `libctags` like Geanys `libmain`?