Exporting Incoming IMs as Text Files

[John Bailey]

Thomas Hruska wrote:
> I just noticed yesterday that all the plugins written in C for Windows 
> are about 500-800K _each_ - most of the source files are 12-20K.  I 
> suspect a lot of the unnecessary bloat is due to Cygwin dragging in its 
> junk during compilation.  My vote for new plugins is definitely the Perl 
> scripting route - makes for a cross-platform plugin without compiling. 
> Cygwin is "slow and bloated".  Perl is just as "slow and bloated". 
> Relatively-speaking, I don't see a whole lot of difference.

Much of the size is the debugging information.  There is no "Cygwin junk," as
you put it, in our Windows "package", nor in any properly compiled plugin.
There is additional size attributed to Windows' library format, but it is
miniscule compared to the debugging information.  This debugging information
could be stripped, but if that were to be done, then it would be impossible to
find crashes on Windows that originate in plugins.  The extra size does not
affect speed in any appreciable sense.

> I'm curious - are there any published Perl plugins out there other than 
> the demo one on the Wiki?  Such plugins would be great examples and 
> would significantly lower the bar when developing plugins for Pidgin. 
> Based solely on what I've read in the Wiki, it seems like someone has to 
> have a deep understanding of Perl, C, glib, and the Pidgin/libpurple 
> source code to author a Perl plugin.  That is a steep learning curve.

The perl interface is very similar to the C interface.  We don't have much
documentation on it because very few of us actually use it.  We welcome patches
and wiki text that fill the documentation void.

John


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