Playing Cupid: the IDE as a matchmaker for plugins

We describe a composable, data-driven, plugin ecosystem for IDEs. Inspired by Unix's and Windows PowerShell's pipeline communication models, each plugin declares data-driven capabilities. Developers can then seamlessly mix,
match, and combine plugin capabilities to produce new insight, without modifying the plugins.

We formalize the architecture using the polymorphic lambda calculus, with special types for source and source locations; the type system prevents nonsensical plugin combinations, and helps to inform the design of new tools and plugins. To illustrate the power of the formalism, we describe several synergies between existing plugins (and tools) made possible by the ecosystem.