Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Scripting Language

[Artur Biesiadowski <abies@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sebastian Bauer wrote:
> 
> Hello Artur
> 
> > Question is if people are ready to add major dependency to freeciv -
> > guile in this case.
> 
> Personally I wouldn't like that (the depedency). The reason is that
> it will break my amiga native port. And probably also the Mac
> port. The add of this dependency would mean that freeciv will be
> less portable :-(


I'm unable to determine the protability, but it is quite possible that
it is unix only thing + possibly win/cygnus32. I didn't think about it
earlier - lack of portability is an issue. I'll research this thing.


> But I must say that I don't know what guile is. Maybe it's very
> portable,too? Where can I get information about that? Does it need
> other libs? And what is about speed?

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html

No, it does not need other libs (except some libc interface - open and
friends). 

Speed is I think acceptable for simple scripts. For such code ( a lot of
function calls, small numer of computations) it should be
comparable/faster than perl I think.

> Anywhy I think freeciv is not ready yet for a script language. But
> this is only my opinion.
> Other opinions?

I think that it is perfectly ready for it as far as code is concerned -
I would like to jump in with it _before_ great run for generalization
will really show it's claws. There are number of things that are or
could be handled in C by great amount of flags and multipage if
statements for all possible cases, just to be general. With script you
just do only what is needed for given ruleset.

Artur