Improve plugin developer experience

[imsnif]

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• [ ] Better stacktraces when a plugin crashes
• [ ] A plugin crash should not crash the whole tool
• [ ] Utility libraries in other languages (starting with javascript/typescript, python and Go)
• [ ] Some sort of easy-to-install one-click compilation solution
• [ ] Better debugging story
• [ ] Improve documentation

[scabala]

Hi @imsnif I would like to ask about utility libraries for other languages point. Does it mean it will be possible to create plugin for Zellij entirely in, for example, Python? Or Lua? What is the approach here? Is it:

• exposing internal mechanisms of Zellij via IPC endpoint like in i3/Sway? or
• have WASM plugin with Python interpreter which will execute script provided by user? Or maybe something entirely else?

I'm asking out of curiosity - one thing that kept me away from creating plugin for Zellij is need to use WASM (which I'm not familiar with) to have something simple like custom status bar.

[imsnif]

The idea is to provide a similar utility library for every language like we have with Rust - so that you can write plugins in python more easily for example.

Truthfully though, the more time passes - for various reasons (only some of them technological) I'm thinking more and more that we should switch out the whole WASM, write it off as a bad idea and move to lua or some similar plugin development language. I know @a-kenji has thoughts on this.

[scabala]

It is actually good to hear ;) I personally believe that in this case, scripting languages are best approach. Can't wait to see it available!

[denismaxim0v]

Regarding this. I'm not sure if you have heard about rhai, but it looks like an interesting idea to explore. @imsnif It's one of the options, but I still think that having wasm is a good idea, just needs some re-working.