On Friday, 2 June 2017 at 02:15:27 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Friday, 2 June 2017 at 02:06:27 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
I wonder if it is possible to somehow turn D in to a scripting
language that can be run inside D?
Why not just use regular compiled D?
Because it requires one to recompile and relink the code for
every change(and to possibly restart the app and redo all the
work to get to some point to start testing the code). In a
scripting engine one can simply call a function and execute
commands immediately in an interactive way. This allows for much
faster testing.
e.g., with a hypothetical app that has an interactive Dscript,
one could do
App.PlaySound("test123.wav");
instead of
1. change test12.wav to test123.wav
2. save file
3. recompile.
4. run
5. Get back to same test point(could be a lot or a little amount
of work).
Regardless, that is not the point though. If that was the only
reason, lua or some other scripting language would suffice.
The problem is that the grammars of all those languages do not
translate directly in to D. Anglescript is a C++ like script that
has a near 1-1 correspondence so "porting" code from it to C++ is
easy.
But it would be nice if a D had a scripting language that used
the same D syntax as this would make porting a piece of cake.
The point is, why should I develop, say, 100's of algorithms in
the scripting language that can never easily be ported to native
and be fast as possible simply because the of the amount of work
to rewrite the code when, semantically, nothing changes?
Wouldn't it be much better to be able to confidently write the
code in a scripting environment that allows for nearly instance
response knowing that it can simply be recompiled to native
without issue when the time comes for performance optimizations?
Anglescript effectively does this. Note only does it have a C++
like syntax, it has the ability to compile to native directly
with an addon.
I'm looking for something like this in D because D's features are
much better. having meta capabilities in scripting would be cool.
