Plugin Crate Setup

Create the crate and add the guest-side dependencies:

cargo new --lib my-plugin
cd my-plugin
cargo add [email protected]
cargo add serde --features derive
cargo add serde_json

Then make two manual edits to the package manifest:

1. Set the library crate-type to ["cdylib", "rlib"]. cdylib is what the component build produces; rlib lets the same crate's pure-logic modules compile and unit-test natively on the host.
2. In the release profile, set opt-level = "s", lto = true, and strip = true. Component size is download and load time; there is no reason to ship debug symbols across the plugin boundary.

Copy the wit/v0/ directory from the ZeroClaw repository into the crate root as wit/. You do not need a full checkout; fetch just that directory from the tag matching your target host version:

git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse \
  https://github.com/zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw /tmp/zeroclaw-wit
git -C /tmp/zeroclaw-wit sparse-checkout set wit
cp -r /tmp/zeroclaw-wit/wit .

The WIT files are the ABI: the host generated its bindings from these exact files, so your guest bindings must come from the same ones. Pin the version: WIT worlds evolve with the host, and a component built against newer worlds than the host binds will fail to instantiate.