[Vm-beginners] Stability of the external plugin interface

[Philip Bernhart]

Hi Eliot,

Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Philip,
>
> On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 9:27 AM Philip Bernhart <philip.bernhart at posteo.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to write an external plugin - I think,
>> for having a fast interface to a C library.
>>
>> How is that currently done?
>
>
> Either by writing a plugin or directly through the FFI.  We can discuss how
> to make the choice between the two but I lean towards the FFI.

Why is that? I see the case for calling external libraries in a more
general fashion FFI. I see why people don't want to have additional
plugins in the VM too, more stuff to maintain -> more bugs, also some
VM internal resource exhaustion issues associated with internal
plugins(?), etc.
I'm not asking for that, I'm talking about external plugins.

I read a little bit the Swiki articles about FFI / Plugins and people
who wrote them generally seemed to lean toward plugins, when it comes to
a layer provided to the users of the functionality which is supposed
to be put into the plugin / library. And they seemed to be a little
bit faster than the FFI interface.

So what are your reasons for prefering FFI over External Plugins? :-)


Thanks for your time,
Philip