[hinkley]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Caddy model requires curation, doesn't it?

Plugins and scripting languages flourish when they democratize the process of adding features to a piece of code. To have prebuilt binaries you need a build matrix, and the complexity of the build matrix is somewhere between exponential and factorial.

This is a perverse incentive for the curators. The cost has to be justified, and as the friction grows you can only justify the things that you have a strong affinity for. Anything you don't understand or don't like gets voted off the island.

In the best addon ecosystems, the core maintainers put some safety rails on the system so the addons can't do anything too crazy. Then they watch the cream of the crop and start trying to include them in the base functionality (limiting the number of optional features the majority of their users have to manually pick). The hard part here is how to reward the people whose ideas you just co-opted, and I don't have a great answer for that (although money and/or a free license for life is a good start)

[sagichmal]

> Plugins and scripting languages flourish when they democratize the process of adding features to a piece of code . . . In the best addon ecosystems, the core maintainers put some safety rails on the system so the addons can't do anything too crazy. Then they watch the cream of the crop and start trying to include them in the base functionality (limiting the number of optional features the majority of their users have to manually pick).

Well, it's a cost/benefit judgment call, not a single valuation. And I think for situations like this, if you have to pick a side, it's generally better to pick the exclusionary walled garden over the bazaar -- I think the value of democratization is usually overstated, and the drawbacks underemphasized.