ikiwiki should support writing plugins in other languages While it should be possible to call ikiwiki from C, doing the callbacks in C is probably hard. And accessing perl at all from C is ugly. It also doesn't make it very easy to write plugins in an interpreted language, since that would mean linking perl and eg, python in one binary. (Been there, done that, never again.) Instead, I'm considering using XML RPC to let ikiwiki communicate with a child process that it can spawn. The child could then be any program, written in any language. It could talk XML RPC via stdio. (This assumes that most languages allow easily serialising XML::RPC calls and responses to a file descriptor. Some XML RPC implementations may be hardcoded to use http..) Here's how it would basically look, not showing the actual XML RPC used to pass values. -> import <- 1 <- hook type => preprocess, id => foo -> 1 <- done 1 -> 1 -> callback type => preprocess, id => foo, page => bar <- 1 <- getconfig url -> "http://example.com", ... <- debug "foo" -> 1 <- done "my return value" -> 1 From ikiwiki's POV: * ikiwiki always initiates each conversation with a command * After sending a command, ikiwiki reads commands, dispatches them, and returns the results, in a loop. * The loop continues until the plugin calls the "done" command, with a value that is the return value for the command that initiated the conversation. From the plugin's POV: * It's probably sitting in an XML::RPC loop. * Get a command from ikiwiki. * Disaptch the command to the appropriate function. The main commands seem to be "import" and "callback"; callback can call any function that the plugin has registered a hook for. Others commands might include "rcs_*" for RCS plugins.. * The function can use XML::RPC to communicate with ikiwiki to get things like config values; and to call ikiwiki functions. * When the callback returns, use XML::RPC to send a "done" command to ikiwiki. Simple enough, really. ikiwiki would need to add accessor functions for all important variables, such as "getconfig" and "setconfig". It would probably be easiest for ikiwiki to dispatch a command by just evaling IkiWiki::$command. Plugin programs could be dropped into /usr/share/ikiwiki/plugins/, and load_plugin() would just open2 the plugin program and call import.