[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Matthew Brush]

On 03/11/11 15:24, Frank Lanitz wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:28:05 +0300
> Alexander Petukhov<Alexander.Petukhov at mail.ru>  wrote:
>
>> 5. Other language bindings - don't really think it can increase
>> plugins quality dramatically, there can be problems in any language
>> that you have to solve in order to make your code work correctly.
> I agree. It will might also split up resources on core side to support
> maybe 5 API as even you do use some kind of automatically binding it
> will not working out of the box in every case.
>
If the core API were more binding friendly, for example using standard 
GObject conventions, a HUGE portion of the work doing bindings would be 
completely automated for quite a number of languages, without any need 
to customize the core for them.  The things that don't work out of the 
box would be fixed in the binding itself as is common with other 
bindings of things.  This is the whole purpose of things like GObject 
introspection (to make GObject bindings automatic and natural to that 
language).

As an example, the Vala bindings are being hacked to death to make them 
more like Vala-ish (make that GObject-ish), when this would be a 
basically fully automated process if the API was already GObject-ish.  
Same with Genie, Python, and probably others with GObject support like 
Perl, Ruby, Scheme, C++, and so on.

Even if it didn't lead to improved plugin quality, which it would at 
least for languages using VMs/interpreters, it would create a lot of new 
functionality for Geany by having much more participation from a wider 
range of programmers.  Just hanging around on the ML and IRC I've heard 
many times Geany users saying they would like to make a plugin but they 
don't know C, they are experts on some other language.  One of the big 
benefits of a plugin system is making it easy for users to extend the 
program, and IMO making the users learn and code properly in C does not 
(necessarily) accomplish that goal.

The barrier to entry to writing Geany plugins currently is such that a 
very small portion of the users (programmers) are able to extend the 
software at all, and those that fake it in C will end up with nasty mess 
of buggy code (like me :).

My 0.02$ CAD

Matthew Brush (codebrainz)