How to use tikzducks on Plain TeX / ConTeXt?

Question

Is it possible to use/port tikzducks in Plain TeX or ConTeXt? As far as I know, tikzducks.sty has some LaTeX-isms as \begin .. \end environments, so it doesn't work outside LaTeX.

Answer 1

For ConTeXt users, my attempt to get TikZ ducks:

1. I deleted LaTeX headers from tikzducks.sty and added the following ones:

\setupcolors[state=start]
\usecolors[xwi]
\usemodule[tikz]
\enabledirectives[colors.pgf]
\usetikzlibrary[patterns] % for the wizard hat
\usetikzlibrary[calc] % for the sports jerseys

2. Delete @ from command names as it was sort of troublesome.
3. Replace some commands by its ConTeXt counterparts, e.g. \starttikzpicture .. \stoptikzpicture for \begin{tikzpicture} .. \end{tikzpicture}.
4. Redefined \duck according to ConTeXt syntax:

\def\duck{\dosingleempty\doduck}
\def\doduck[#1]{%
\iffirstargument
\startscope%
\tikzset{/duck/.cd,#1}%
\duckdraw%
\stopscope%
\else
\startscope%
\tikzset{/duck/.cd}%
\duckdraw%
\stopscope%
\fi 
}

5. Some other minor changes.

Although the color palette is a bit messed up because of the ConTeXt color management (e.g. ConTeXt gray looks like LaTeX lightgray), the final result is quite acceptable.

The following code:

%\environment_tikzducks and your .tex file must be in the same folder
%unless you use subpath structure, e.g. subfolder/environment_tikzducks
\environment environment_tikzducks
\starttext 
Ducks in \CONTEXT\ go brrr
\startcolumns[n=3]
\dorecurse{20}{%
\starttikzpicture \randuck \stoptikzpicture%

}
\stopcolumns 
\stoptext

gives the output:

For anyone interested, I'm sharing the edited code here

EDIT

Sam Carter, the maintainer of tikzducks accepted my pull request to add a ConTeXt wrapper, so finally tikzducks is available in TeXLive. Just do:

\usemodule[tikzducks]
\usecolors[xwi]

and now you can use \tikzducks and related inside ConTeXt's \starttikzpicture ... \stoptikzpicture. It should work fine in LuaMetaTeX, too. Feel free to do suggestions here. A Metapost counterpart would be nice btw.