Plugins in Rust: The Technologies

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2021-05-21 06:00:05

In this article I will further analyze how a Plugin Development Kit (PDK) could be implemented in Rust. Note that I’m no expert in the topic; my objective is to merely collect all the information I’ve found so far and present it as a summary, with enough resources for the reader to learn more on their own and make their own decisions.

This is actually part of my Google Summer of Code project for Tremor. My first article about a Plugin System in Rust was in the proposal, which serves as a full introduction and may be interesting as well. While this will specifically cover Tremor’s use case, I’m sure many other applications in the future will have similar requirements for their own program. And considering the few articles I found about plugins in Rust, this may be helpful to the community.

After showing the proposal to the Tremor team, I was given an important suggestion: in this case there isn’t really a need to be able to write plugins from multiple programming languages; it’s not worth the additional complexity. It would definitely be interesting but with this I can focus on the main problems I discovered in my proposal: the ABI instability, and safety.