I accept the technical possibility but question whether it is actually pragmatically sensible. How many external plugins are used by windows, unix & mac VMs?
I don't know and I think we'll only find out once we start breaking things. So far, we have been 100% backward compatible and I just don't see any particularly good reason to break that compatibility when we're not even introducing anything new here.
Is it a common enough usage pattern (using old external plugins) to be worth supporting?
Why break it if there isn't any benefit? All we're talking about is to replace these two lines in sqVirtualMachine[.h|.c] from fetchWordOfObject to fetchLong32 (or whatever). Compared to the amount of time we're spending even having this discussion the amount of time just fixing it seems comparadly small.
Cheers, - Andreas