[sldev] Plugin API Architecture for Second Life

[Tofu Linden]

Matt Evans wrote:
> I know Lua is more of a scripting language rather then a true plugin
> architecture, but it would provide a lot of what people want from a
> plugin architecture and has the active benefit of being cross platform
> and well supported.

Lua is spectacular, lightweight, portable, fast and flexible - having
implemented it for game and UI logic in the past I would totally support
it as an embedded scripting language should it be decided that the
client would benefit from such a thing.

Sadly I think that discussion is quite orthogonal to the more important
question of what the plugin API should look like, i.e. what
functionality needs to be exposed to plugins and what the interface to
that functionality should look like.  Once that interface is
established, binding it to a scripting language is usually fairly
straightforward.

The question behind that of exposed functionality should be: what
do people anticipate doing with such plugins?  'Everything' is perhaps
not a very useful answer for initial API planning.  :)

Kind regards,
- Tofu!