The big cleanup for our Xojo plugins

There is something I’d like to talk about. Fewer people are using Real Studio and as we approach the end of live for 32-bit on all operation systems, the days of Real Studio are counted. Everyone should move this year to Xojo in order to support 64-bit later this year.

For my Xojo and Real Studio plugins, I do consider dropping Real Studio versions. Old plugins stay of course available for a long time, but download rates on current plugins in the Real Studio format are far down (<3%). Would someone miss newer plugins not being available in Real Studio format?

Second I may do a big cleanup and remove old stuff like everything related to QuickTime, FSSpec, GWorld pictures and maybe a few more like the older overlay window class. We could even consider dropping Carbon for Mac. Wait, I think this is still used for console projects, so we may need to keep it around.

On the plugin itself, we may merge some to reduce the number of plugins we deliver and make it easier to manage them. Or otherwise split them more into individual ones, so you can easier sort out the parts you don’t need. Not sure yet.

Otherwise I could really cleanup more aggressive and remove some parts. For example the ImageMagick plugin is not well maintained by me as I favorite the GraphicsMagick one for my own projects. Same for the PHP plugin which is not the best thing in the world as the php code misses usually extensions and the apache environment. Next to drop could be LCMS Plugin for the older 1.x version of the library. Everyone should have moved to 2.x already.

In general unless a lot of people relay on something, the cleanup could make my life easier, the build processes and deployment faster and finally with less plugins to load actually give faster Xojo startup times.

What do you think?