[lhecker]

I'm not familiar with that, so I can't say. If you have any links on that topic, I'd appreciate it.

Generally speaking, the requirement on my end is that whatever we use is as minimal as it gets: Minimal binary size overhead and minimal performance overhead. It also needs to be cross-platform of course. This for instance precludes the widely used WinRT ABI that's being used nowadays on Windows.

[karunamurti]

Maybe something like https://www.codecentric.de/en/knowledge-hub/blog/plug-in-arc... ?

Webassembly is the binary spec for the web. But now everyone is using that because it's portable and lightweight.

The idea is you can create plugin using any language that compiles into webassembly. C, Rust, Pascal, Go, C++. Compile once and it should work in Windows, Linux and Mac. No need to compile to multiple architecture.

Performance should be great near native, but I guess there's going to be a problem with the added webassembly runtime size. Here is a runtime with estimated sizes: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-micro-runtime

And it's sandboxed too, so should be secure.

[karunamurti]

And I guess forcing FFI for plugins is going to be a headache for many plugin authors.