Accessing GIMP’s internal GEGL operations outside of GIMP

[activey]

Hi everyone,

GIMP defines many custom GEGL operations with the gimp:* prefix (for example, gimp:color-balance, gimp:threshold, etc.).
As far as I can tell, these are registered programmatically inside GIMP during startup - they don’t exist as separate loadable GEGL plugins or .so files.

Is there any supported or practical way to make these gimp:* operations available to an external GEGL-based application, or to initialize the same set of operations in another process?

Specifically:

- Can GIMP’s GEGL operation registration be triggered externally (e.g. by linking or loading GIMP libraries)?
- Has anyone successfully reused these operations outside of GIMP’s runtime environment?
- Or is embedding code inside GIMP itself the only way to access them?

Any insight or code references from the GIMP source tree where these ops are registered would be very helpful.

Thanks!