The core of EPlugin is a light-weight object loader and callback invocation system. Because of the varied calling conventions of different languages, and to reduce the overhead of the plugin system itself, all callbacks only receive and return a single argument. By using structures to pass complex arguments, native C plugins require no extra overhead, and marshalling details are moved into the plugin implementation itself where required. It also simplifies memory management issues significantly. For example, the C plugin handler merely loads a shared library using GModule, and resolves a symbol by name; and is so all of 50 lines of code, total. The loaders are the only modules which need to interace with non-native code or conventions.

The other task of the plugin core is to load XML definitions of the plugins. Extension hooks are registered with the plugin core before the plugins are scanned, and are automatically instantiated to load each definition appropriately as they are encountered.

At each layer, a level of indirection is used so that new loaders and new hooks can be added transparently, and extend the plugin definition freely with any information they require.