Jinx VS xvm

Check out jinx https://jamesboer.github.io/Jinx/

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of automated tests where it makes sense. I wrote a scripting language that I use for my personal game projects, and I never would have been able to do it if it weren't for the battery of tests for every feature, error, and corner case I could think of. But games are rarely like other software, with hard rules about what is "correct" or "incorrect". And it would be a nightmare to try to keep up with designers, constantly tweaking and tuning, so what's "correct" is literally a day to day, constantly moving target.

A second trial for you might be Jinx. Depending on your definition of procedural, Jinx is 100% only procedural. https://jamesboer.github.io/Jinx/

Jinx (embeddable scripting language) works as following:

Feel free to look at my own interpreter, written in modern C++. You're welcome to ask me if you have any questions.

I use my own scripting language more like content, especially for things like one-off events and behaviors. Example: scripting special behaviors for a boss fight, or a room with a unique trap in it, or any other sort of one-off behavior that would be overkill for C++, but too complex for most other types of data-driven content. These days, visual scripting also helps to fill in these gaps between content and procedure.

You're welcome to look at my scripting language Jinx, written in modern C++. Just let me know if you have specific questions. Data flow is JxLexer.cpp -> JxParser.cpp -> JxScript.cpp. Most everything else is implementation details. Also, note the parer is pretty complex, mostly because Jinx has a crazily flexible syntax for functions.

Feel free to look at Jinx if you want an example of what I consider a fairly easy-to-use and integrate scripting system. Obviously, I'm a bit biased since I wrote it.

If you're working in UTF-8 internally, you could just write your own UTF-16 to UTF-8 conversion functions to convert strings at API boundaries. I did this in my scripting language because I didn't want to bring in dependencies.

Have a look at the ecstasy library for the language definitions of these types.

2) Funky interfaces: This is an Ecstasy interface that declares abstract static members (e.g. functions), which can then be implemented on any class and overridden on any sub-class, such that they can be invoked by type (instead of this), and virtually resolved (late bound at runtime) based on the type known at compile time. The best known example, of course, is Hashable, because it has to guarantee that a type implements both equals() and hashCode() on the same class, and the implementation is tied to the type, and not to the this. (C# added a similar feature last year in version 11.)

I'm just going to warn you in advance that invocation is one of the hardest things in the compiler to make easy. In other words, the nicer your language's "developer experience" is around invocation, the more hell you're going to have to go through to get there. The AST nodes for Name( (NameExpression) and Invoke( (InvocationExpression) alone are 7kloc in the Ecstasy implementation, for example -- but the result is well worth it.

Ecstasy uses message passing automatically behind the scenes for asynchronous calls, but the message passing isn't visible at the language level (i.e. there is no "message object" or something like that visible). Basically, all Ecstasy code is executing on a fiber inside a service, and services are all running concurrently, so from any service realm to any service realm, the communication is by message.

Regarding Ecstasy, we did not set out to build a new language; we actually set out to solve a real world problem. Specifically, we wanted to be able to dramatically improve the density of workloads in data centers, by at least two orders of magnitude in the case of lightly used applications. Our initial goal was to create a runtime design that would support 10,000 stateful application instances on a single server. Let's call it the "a10k" problem 🤣 ... a tribute to the c10k problem from 1999. We refer to our goal as "zero carbon compute", i.e. we want to push the power and hardware cost for an application to as close to zero as possible; you can't reach zero, but you can get close. If we succeed, we will help reduce the electricity used in data centers over the next few decades by a significant percentage.

Generally, left to right, one character at a time. If you’re looking for example code, here’s a simple hand-built lexer.

Parts of Ecstasy are now implemented in Ecstasy. Here's the Lexer, for example.

Ecstasy

Ecstasy and the xvm were designed assuming an adaptive runtime compiler (similar in concept to the Hotspot compiler for Java), but not necessarily using a JIT.

A Future reference has the various capabilities that you'd imagine, taking lambdas for thenDo(), whenComplete(), etc. The reference, in the above example, is a local variable, so you just obtain it using the C-style & operator: