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Lightweight Scripting/Extension Languages?

Posted by Cliff on from the when-the-code-footprint-is-everything dept.

Andy Tai asks: "Extension languages are designed to be embedded in applications to support customization of the application behavior. Common scripting languages, like Perl and Python, are fairly 'large' with powerful run-time engines and libraries and are widely available and 'script' writers usually assume their stand-alone existences in the deployment environment. However, if one is looking for a language that's small enough so its source can be embedded in the distribution of and built as part of the application, Python and Perl may be 'overweight.' For the real lightweight choices there are Lua and Tinyscheme. Are there others? What are people's preferences and opinions regarding lightweight extension languages?"

4 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Javascript! by Geek+Boy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ECMAScript/Javascript seems like a logical choice. it was made for just that - embedding. It's quite small to implement, and there are many opensource implementations out there already. It can be procedural or OO, and everyone knows how to use it if they've done some basic web work.

    1. Re:Javascript! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
      Mozilla implementation of JavaScript in C is available at http://www.mozilla.org/js/ and pure Java implementation is at http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

      And btw, ECMAScript/JavaScript can be pure functional as well.

  2. How about JavaScript? by Rich · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been working on a system for embedding JS in KDE apps (amongst other reasons it is a about 1/10 the size of a python interpreter). You can find lots of information at http://xmelegance.org/kjsembed. The interpreter in KDE has no dependency on KDE/Qt or anything else so you might find it usable in your app.

  3. Why another language? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Extension languages are designed to be embedded in applications to support customization of the application behavior. Common scripting languages, like Perl and Python, are fairly 'large' with powerful run-time engines and libraries and are widely available and 'script' writers usually assume their stand-alone existences in the deployment environment.

    Well you're not obligated to provide the libraries. For instance, Blender, which uses Python, did not include Python libraries ; however it was possible for people which really wished it, to set paths to point to libraries. Forcing the users to learn a new language, just to cut the size of the distribution is misguided IMHO. Just provide the extension language (& support) as an optionnal individually downloadable shared library.