Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Adding scripting language

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin Willemoes Hansen wrote:
> 
> Umh this is just an gennerel idea.
> 
> Could it be posible to have more than one scripting language? Like using
> some kind of binding scheme?

Yup, it could be done.

The standard way to do this would be to externalise all the functions we
plan to make available to the scripting language as a
dynamically-loadable C library.  Then all the major players (python,
perl, guile, tcl) have different, but well-known, ways of 'wrapping' a C
library with the language.

The more complex bit is 'genericising' the interface for actually
plugging in the appropriate virtual machine.  If we really wanted to be
clever, we could instead have a separate perl/python/guile process which
communicates (using the above mentioned C library) with the civserver
process by (for example) a unix-domain socket.

In fact, one of the main design points of guile is supposed to be the
simplicity with which other languages can be implemented in it - so, the
theory went, once you've embedded guile in your app, you've embedded
them all.  Sadly, there aren't many languages implemented 'in-guile' in
this way (that I know of).

Jules

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