Hacking-Game VS embedded-scripting-languages

Somewhat emu related, I’ve been asking ChatGPT to explain how random programs written in a custom assembly language for a custom architecture work (with no details on the arch just the code for the program, e.g. like this and I’d play around with seeing how much of the comments I could remove) and it’s been able to explain them fairly correctly (how they work and what the intended purpose of them is, with mistakes here or there), it would even say stuff like “This program is written in assembly language for a hypothetical processor”. Even going on to ask it how do I use it and it’s sometimes even explained how to configure it properly. Granted the assembly for that arch isn’t crazily unique (a lot of normal conventions, a number of x86 style instructions, etc.). But I even tried it with programs for another arch which is a lot more unique (control programs for a text mode graphics adapter which uses some stack based assembly language) and it even explained those pretty well. Like the code for a macro for creating a newline program it was able to tell that it’s for some grid based text system, and even went on to explain that if certain arguments were passed it would draw the character repeatedly on the same line to create a solid block of characters.

Brief overview of the spec

Hopefully the linked README provides a general overview (I know I need to write some more documentation!), but Steel is an implementation of the scheme programming language (not entirely compliant yet, but aiming for R5RS and R7RS compliance). It can be used as a standalone language via the interpreter/repl (like Python or Racket), or it can be embedded inside applications, like Lua. There are hundreds (thousands, probably) of embeddable languages, each with their own flavor - see a list compiled here for example https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages

Use cases are generally for either configuration, scripting, or plugins - so scripting in games, or adding extensions to your text editor without having to use FFI or RPC + serializing a bunch of data. The advantage it has over using dynamic libraries (in general) is it runs in the same process, and can access the internal data structures directly without a lot of ceremony involved. The downside is typically is not as fast as native code unless a JIT is involved.

Javascript is an example of an embedded scripting, where the browser is the host application.

> There is a huge opportunity, IMO, for more players here.

There are quite a few embeddable scripting languages [1]. I think these days it's less common to embed a language mostly because there are good high-level languages that applications can be predominantly written in.

[1] https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages

I'm not a huge fan of Lua but I think it is at least way more popular and better on every measure than TCL. There are plenty of other better less well-known options too: Rhai, Wren, AngelScript, Starlark (for some use cases), etc. There's a good list here.

or perhaps use one of this list (depending on who's writing the configuration): https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages

https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages (coincidentally, from a user whose name I recognize from the Tcl wiki)