I'm building Chauffeur, a local Windows tool that snapshots your whole working state across apps — open files, editor tabs, browser tabs, projects — and restores it on demand. "Save game" for your desktop. 100% local: no cloud, no account, no telemetry.
But this post isn't a pitch. It's about the one architecture decision that shaped everything: how do other apps plug into the core? I ended up running two completely different plugin models on purpose, and the reasoning is worth sharing.
The setup
A small background service (C++/Qt 6) exposes a local REST API. Everything integrates through that single point. The question was never really "what language" — it was in-process or out-of-process. Those are the two real choices, and the language question mostly answers itself afterward.
Model 1 — In-process plugins (C++ shared libs)
