What language must I use for a Pidgin plugin?

Question

I'm a relatively inexperienced programmer looking to make a plugin for the IM client Pidgin as a first major project. I've written a program in Python that has all the functionality I want, but I have not yet integrated GTK functionality, so it can't affect the UI yet.

In searching for how-tos on Pidgin plugins, I came across the C How-to on the Pidgin Developers site. Am I to infer that C is the only language I can use to write a plugin for Pidgin? Not C++, not C#, and certainly not Python?

I am certain I have plugins installed that are nothing more than Perl scripts—not compiled as a .so, like the default Pidgin plugins are. So if Perl is OK, does that mean I can somehow kludge something together with Python?

Answer 1

Your choices are presently C, Perl, or Tcl. You can also interface in a more limited way with Pidgin over DBus on Linux, which supports a very broad swath of languages.

In theory, you could write C bindings to other languages to support a native Pidgin interface in that language, but as far as I know there aren't any completed, production-quality examples of that yet. However, there are projects in progress at least for Python (yay!) and PHP.