Plug-ins Should be Visible across Plug-in Hosts

[tsmaeder]

Currently, only plugin-ins that are managed by the same plug-in hosted instance manager can see each other (via the plugin API) and communicate among themselves.
I believe it would be better if the "location" of a plugin (which plugin manager, which sidecar or otherwise remote machine) would be completely transparent to the plugin. This would simplify the programming model for API consumers and give us more freedom on how to run plug-ins (for example in the same or different docker containers).

[tsmaeder]

This is related to eclipse-che/che#12395

[benoitf]

AFAIK it can't be transparent, one plug-in can export (javascript export) a function (or anything) to another plug-in
so if it's not in the same host, I'm not sure how it can really works

[paul-marechal]

@benoitf are you talking about this? https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/vscode-api#extensions

[tsmaeder]

@benoitf it makes no difference whether the other plugin runs in a different process or a different machine: you still need a way to marshal/unmarshal the call. How does VS Code handle this case?