[Thunar-dev] Non-C plugin support?

[Benedikt Meurer]

Sudrien wrote:
> I have to say I have been quite happy working with Thunar the past month
> or so, and very happy to find a plugin interface aleady implemented when I
> looked at the code.
> 
> My question is, Do plugins have to be written in C? I'd love to try some
> experiments in writing one, but started with C++, and and currently prefer
> Ruby. Is there currently any support, or planned support?

There's an experimental python plugin, but I failed at some point with
PyGTK 2.6. Should work with 2.8 tho, so I might continue with the plugin.

You should be able to use C++, wrapping the C interfaces to C++ classes
and implementing the three required functions with extern "C". But be
sure to mark your plugin resident, as depending on the libraries you
use, the C++ runtime may not be "cleanly unloadable".

Concerning Ruby or other languages: The easiest way to support plugins
would be a "wrapper" plugin for Thunar, that translates the interesting
provider calls to D-BUS calls, which can be handled by registered
scripts. Might be a bit slow in some cases (i.e. bulk renamer with >
1000 files), but on the other hand, the increased flexibility should
justify the small decrease in performance in extreme cases. If somebody
wants to start with such a plugin, I'd be very interested about the
progress.

> -Sudrien

Benedikt