otto VS hof

robertkrimen/otto

Ummm, excuse me, but where the f&$k has this been hiding? I’ve been looking for ways to extend my go applications with scripting support. I started with Lua (worked ) then Python (worked but hacky) then javascript using otto [1]. However it lacks ES6 support so having pretty OOP js code is a non-starter. I would love to have Java as a runtime that can be executed from goroutines.

[1] https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto

Either call a JavaScript interpreter like node with exec.Command and read its stdout, or use a pure Go JavaScript interpreter like goja or otto.

Otto https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto Seems interesting. It lets me call Go functions from inside JS as well as return results. The fncs pattern reminds me a bit of how the template engine works.

> why host other languages

Here's an example:

I recently finished building https://subzo.com.au which allows customizing and ordering 3D models. The way the model's cost, volume and other attributes are calculated needs to be done both on the frontend (for speed) and on the backend (to validate). Backend is in Go and we can't practically run Go in the browser. So instead, I wrote the calculation snippets in JavaScript (which runs natively in the browser) and ran them on the backend on a JavaScript VM library written in Go [1].

[1]: https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto

Googling suggests https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto which allows scripting in javascript for golang projects. This would be definitely enough, but in some way it may be a bit overkill - and scripts supporter shall need some knowledge of javascript which is not always straightforward :)

It doesn't make sense to ask the user (aka me) to change the code every time I want to modify any web apps right? So I decided to split the webapps into two parts. WebApps are those only require basic permissions and do not interact with the host OS. They will be run inside a sandbox created using ECMA5 VM called Otto. The other type is called Subservice, in which it will need extra permission to interact with the OS and require higher level of access to the backend file system.

Many business analysts use SQL, have for a long time. They are probably not your target audience. With the problem being JAVA specific, you'd likely want to start there

This sounds similar to the goals of my hof tool (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof), lift type definitions out of code so they can be defined in one place, then generate the code for all the places. Is that sounding like what you are after?

Having built something similar, the biggest challenge for users is that they have to use a bespoke language, like WASP here. I suspect that it is also your biggest challenge as well.

Mine is built on CUE, which at least has the potential to become a more widely used language. CUE hasn't reached sufficient maturity for broader adoption yet, so I continue to face this same problem.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

Here's a big one I needed to get ChatGPT to do something more sophisticated with a JSON object response (predates functions and all that)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

It no longer worked after a model update some time ago, haven't tried recently.

I found codellama to be much better for this and require fewer instructions, an anecdotal validation for smaller, focussed models

I was surprised out how you can define arbitrary grammars using arbitrary formulation and it would follow it. Of course you have to redo the prompt every time there is an update... such a pain

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

CUE is indeed a beautiful language, will get those mind juices flowing for sure!

There is more work to be done on the codec implementation, but if you just want to split yaml/json across files, CUE is a great option

You might also like my project, built on CUE: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof We have a TUI where you can explore and work with CUE, JSON, Yaml

You can pretty much make up any pseudo grammar like this one, which is a reduced JSON object that is close to CUE: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

No need to be formal or use a standard format

Yea, in particular for this project, they have created a bespoke templating system.

You can get the same thing with Go text/templates by adding chat function(s) as custom a helper: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/lib/templates...

100% one of the best things about building a TUI is not having the pain of modern web development. I do think there is a way to have a CLI & TUI come from the same code, so you can get the best of both, or pick the best for the task at hand.

experiments in progress here: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_dev/lib/tui

CUE is another interesting language to use from within Go, and is rather natural, given CUE is implemented in Go, but you can also do way more cool things with CUE via the Go API.

We're using CUE to validate and transform data, as input to code gen, the basis for a DAG task engine, and more

https://cuelang.org | https://pkg.go.dev/cuelang.org/[email protected]/cue | https://cuetorials.com/go-api (learn about CUE)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof (where we are doing these things)

here is one of our early examples: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...