biwascheme VS luau

If Scheme is something you enjoy, BiwaScheme's interpreter can be instantiated from within Javascript and can be used to evaluate Scheme code.

https://www.biwascheme.org/

This project is very exciting. In the meantime, there are a couple of options:

BiwaScheme: https://www.biwascheme.org/

Advantages: written in JavaScript, with excellent JS interop. Project has some history.

Disadvantages: slower than S7 (though still plenty fast for many uses), less-complete (e.g., no syntax-rules or syntax-case, though it does have its own define-macro).

S7 Scheme: https://cm-gitlab.stanford.edu/bil/s7

Written in C, but can be transpiled to WASM (see https://github.com/actonDev/s7-playground/ )

Advantages: This project also has some history. Considerably faster than BiwaScheme.

Disadvantages: JS interop is clumsier (basically the same issues as JS interop with any WASM code... this could probably be mitigated considerably if someone wanted to take the time).

For Scheme implementations there are LIPS and biwascheme. I haven't done more than play around with them, so I can't really give an informed opinion about pros and cons or favorites.

I used to have hundreds of open tabs. From there I kept repurposing it to do more stuff with the browser until it reached its current state, where I want to make it a "extend firefox from Emacs" thing. It kinda do that already, but extending the firefox-extension itself require the extension to be re-built (so you need whole javascript tooling, rebuild and reload the addon etc). I am considering adding something like biwascheme to it soon to work around that.

And then users can just use biwascheme and run programs in mainframes and their smart toasters

Languages like Biwa Scheme and LIPS Scheme are good for running Scheme in the browser. But I would prefer compiling Scheme code to JavaScript in the server, then serving the compiled JavaScript image to the browser.

Just a note that even BiwaScheme doesn't fully implement call/cc, it doesn't save the whole environment when capturing.

Very cool! Do you know how this compares with Biwascheme? https://www.biwascheme.org/

Biwascheme has some weird scoping bugs that makes me a litte afraid of using it for serious stuff. It seems nixe and all, but this: https://github.com/biwascheme/biwascheme/issues/125 is not very confidemce inspiring.

There is another schemey language that compiles to JS that accepts things like this:

    (when (start-are-aligned?)

As far as I can tell, they aren't.

http://lua-users.org/wiki/SandBoxes

There is a lot of information there, but it doesn't handle resource exhaustion, execution time limits or give any guarantees. It does indicate that it's possible, and has a decent example of the most restrictive setup, which is a good start. But I would for example compare it with Luau's SECURITY.md.

From https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/blob/master/SECURITY.md:

> Luau provides a safe sandbox that scripts can not escape from, short of vulnerabilities in custom C functions exposed by the host. This includes the virtual machine and builtin libraries. Notably this currently does not include the work-in-progress native code generation facilities.

> Any source code can not result in memory safety errors or crashes during its compilation or execution. Violations of memory safety are considered vulnerabilities.

> Note that Luau does not provide termination guarantees - some code may exhaust CPU or RAM resources on the system during compilation or execution.

So, even luau will have trouble with untrusted code, but it specifies exactly what happens and so on. I think that's fair enough.

Alternatively, Luau is a well-supported Lua variant with type checking and performance improvements, aimed more towards being a sandboxed embedded scripting environment.

https://luau-lang.org/

If you need Lua but also type-safety, how about Luau [1] then?

[1] https://luau-lang.org/

I had the pleasure of working with Lua 5.1 back in the late noughties. For me it's replaced Tcl whenever I want something I can configure above a C library. At the time I used it I found it quite nice but I'll also not forget the hours I wasted tracking down nil table corruptions which could have easily been caught by a type checker.

I had some hope that Luau https://luau-lang.org or Teal https://github.com/teal-language/tl would make things better but with the following example

    function foo(x: number): string

Looking at other replies here, I can see I wasn't the only one who didn't realize there is Lua and Luau. Luau is an extension of Lua: https://luau-lang.org/

> Luau is syntactically backwards-compatible with Lua 5.1 (code that is valid Lua 5.1 is also valid Luau); however, we have extended the language with a set of syntactical features that make the language more familiar and ergonomic.

Lua is usually the embedded language of choice. If you are focused on security, you could check out the Roblox fork, Luau (https://github.com/Roblox/luau) where the creators took extra care to lock down the language on what scripts could do.

Luau - Lua variant by Roblox

On a side note, I've heard that they recently switched from Lua to Roblox's own fork of Lua, Luau.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=luau+roblox&sp=...

Luau

https://github.com/Roblox/luau

Roblox wrote a superset of Roblox Lua which is way faster

https://luau-lang.org/ - some documentation, and examples https://create.roblox.com/docs - documentation, tutorials, and examples https://www.youtube.com/user/AlvinBLOX - tutorials https://www.youtube.com/@TheDevKing/videos - tutorials https://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/ - not specific to Roblox, but Lua reference manual https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-lua - Lua on Codecademy