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kotlinlang

I saw this <https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/13263682579346/comments/14853063511058|https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/13263682579346/comments/14853063511058> today which mentions how third party plugins will need to have a separate custom plugin for Fleet and for IntelliJ.

From my experience with ide plugins, they always seem to be slow to stay up to date, and always seem to lack maintainers, even for very popular libraries. This is in no way a criticism towards those folks, I understand how it's often one of the last things that take priority over maintaining the library itself.

With that said, I can't help but think that having a separate plugin required for Fleet will just mean that most of them will simply not be able to put in the time to make it happen. Or if they do, will have an even harder time maintaining it.

What are your thoughts regarding this in general? Is the hope perhaps that the newly built from the ground up plugin support for Fleet will be simpler therefore maintainers will have an easier time? Perhaps Jetbrains folks can help with migrating some of the most critical/integral ones for the community? Plugins like ktlint and square/SQLDelight come to mind as examples of very important ones for a lot of people.

If there was any other discussion around this before I'd love to see it, so please do link it here.

Fleet is a new IDE built from scratch. The requirement to support IntelliJ IDEA plugins directly would be a too strong limitation for innovations. It seems quite logical to have a new plugin architecture for the new IDE, given its distributed nature and architectural approaches.  Although we are going to provide some bridges for IntelliJ plugins to make their functionality available in Fleet as part of the IntelliJ backend for Fleet, there still be a necessity to write code to adapt them for Fleet both on backend and frontend sides.

Yes, I understand the necessity of it, I wouldn't argue against that. I'm just saying that from experience most ide plugins are already very hard to maintain.
Have you discussed this with some of the current ide plugin maintainers? What do they think of the possibility to support both? If they just ignore fleet as it will naturally be the one with less adoption (at least for the beginning), will that be an acceptable outcome for now?

<@U010JQZ3FRC> Right, that's a good point. We're launching the Fleet Plugins Private Preview program right now. One of the goals is to get feedback from IntelliJ plugins developers regarding feasibility of porting their plugins to Fleet.

That is great to hear! I hope that with you being free of backwards compatibility the entire experience is gonna be simpler enough that folks have an easy time porting everything over :blush: