<https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/18439-compose-for-ide-plugin-development-experimental-> Shoul...

# compose-desktop

[Colton Idle]

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/18439-compose-for-ide-plugin-development-experimental-

Should we use this over the plugin template included in the JB compose repo?

[olonho]

This is infra plugin for development of other IDEA plugins

[SrSouza]

So the idea is to depend on this plugin while writing a plugin for IntelliJ with Compose ?

[olonho]

https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/master/examples/intellij-plugin-with-experimental-shared-base

[Colton Idle]

Ah. thanks. glad the docs actually called out what the difference is.

Regarding that difference though

"The only difference from examples/intellij-plugin is that this version does not bundle Compose runtime, which makes the plugin smaller and allows sharing Compose runtime between multiple plugins (Compose class files and native libraries are not loaded by each plugin)."

Don't you need to ship the compose runtime though? or is the idea that IntelliJ will ship with the compose runtime which allows IDE plugins like this to just piggyback off of that instance?

[Colton Idle]

I guess my other question is... if I wanted to write a plugin today would I use this thing or the template?

[mikehearn]

Plugins can depend on other plugins, iirc.

[mikehearn]

IJ basically has a small package manager in it. So the idea is your plugin depends on this other one and then they both share the Compose runtime without it being bundled into IJ itself.

[Colton Idle]

interesting. its still not perfectly clear to me but when it comes time to write my plugin i will look into it more. thanks