[Suggestion] Plugin system for the Rust rewrite

Rust can export its libraries to .dll, .plugin and .so. So basically I would export a library and its main function would be called. You could import a library containing Graviton’s API.

use graviton;

fn main() {

}

https://gist.github.com/CoolOppo/67b452c125bb0db3212a9fbc44c84245

[marc2332]

Update: Graviton Desktop now loads extensions installed in <HOME_DIR>/.graviton/extensions

[marc2332]

So far, the idea is this:

Extensions will have a single manifest file, (probably Cargo.toml). But, inside the extensions they can freely load more extensions which have it’s own information.

Example (from GitExtension):

impl Extension for GitExtension {
    fn get_info(&self) -> ExtensionInfo {
        ExtensionInfo {
            id: env!("CARGO_PKG_NAME").to_string(),
            name: env!("CARGO_PKG_NAME").to_string(),
        }
    } 
}

Every loaded extension will provide a get_info method which will return information about the Extension, in the case of the Git Extension I am just passing the values from the Cargo.toml, which are copied on compile time.

Because of this idea that Extensions can load multiple extensions, one extension could contain a group of extensions. To make it easier, it would be handy if all the extensions informations from the same group had something like a parent id, which pointed to the parent extension ID that would be defined in the manifest file. So, although they would be separate extensions, they would still be grouped via the parent ID.