[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.

[lhecker]

What I imagined is that people could load runtimes like node.js as a plugin itself in order to then load plugins written in non-native languages (JavaScript, Lua, etc.; node.js being an extreme example). I wonder if WASM could also be one such "adapter plugin"?

But plugins are still a long way off. Until then, I updated the issue to include your suggestion (thank you for it!): https://github.com/microsoft/edit/issues/17

[karunamurti]

Yeah the choice usually js or lua. Webassembly is just a new option.