sligh VS Jinx

But, you still seem hung up on this, so here’s actual code: https://github.com/amw-zero/sligh/blob/main/lib/codegen.ml.

Of course. Here was the first incarnation: https://github.com/amw-zero/sligh. It has a decent overview of the idea in the readme. To sum it up here, the idea is: have a language built around model-driven development and model-based testing, where you write a simple model of an application, and the implementation and model-based tests are compiled for you. I wrote about the overall model-based testing strategy here. This idea comes from self-certifying compilers that produce proofs of their correctness such as Cogent, but we drop the formality requirement and use property-based testing to compare the implementation and model.

Honorable mention - I’m working on a language with similar goals: Sligh, and I’ve written about why I think it’s such a compelling idea before as well too.

In Sligh, I spent most of the last month introducing a new intermediate representation to make tier splitting (choosing if code should live on the client or server) easier. My goal was to enable derived data, as in a model that queries other models for its data and combines them by processing them in memory. I've been using the example of a personal finance application, so imagine:

The language that I work on is Sligh, and it's out of the bulleted list because it's nowhere near as mature as any of those that I listed, and I'm more of a verification enthusiast vs. expert. Almost all of the ideas in it are borrowed from somewhere else, but I think the one quasi-unique idea is it allows you to write a pure logical description / specification of an application, and it generates full-stack web application code from that.

I’m currently using Pest, though I wouldn’t exactly recommend my compiler as a ‘good example’ just yet because I’m prototyping and just churning code out.

Sligh

So tactically it’s currently a source-to-source compiler, where in the source language (my language) you denote the system state transitions, i.e. by writing create!, update!, etc, and those get compiled to corresponding client and server code in the target language (JS for now, but hoping to support WebAssembly in the future). Heres an example program. The compiler source is there too. I’m hacking it together right now, so it’s not my finest work :D

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.