We are searching for a scripting language. It should be reasonably fast, safe and allow us to easily embed functions into our engine. It should also be able to handle types without too complex marshalling.
- lua has two implementations: hlua and rlua. Both are no longer worked on and embed the C library with all of its downsides regarding safety. Untrusted scripts could well crash the program, introduce unsound operations or at least slow down operation dramatically. On the other hand, it's also known to be one of the fastest scripting languages out there. hlua wraps Lua 5.2 and rlua wraps lua 5.4 (and takes safety a bit more seriously). The latter has 64 bit integers and 64 bit floats (instead of just floats), which maps well to our domain.
The lua runtime is a piece of art. Even if we end up creating a new language, we should take some cues from its implementation.
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gluon is a statically typed functional language. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to compile, which has prevented me from benchmarking it.
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dyon is a dynamically typed scripting language. The syntax looks weird, the error messages are bare and the docs less than stellar, but I was able to implement a small function embedding example to benchmark.
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rhai is yet another dynamically typed language that uses an AST based interpreter and offers no_std compatibility. It is likely slower than the other languages, and its embedding API does not lend itself to fast execution of a call to a rhai-defined function.
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koto is a dynamically typed language meant for live coding. It's got a byte code interpreter and should be fairly easy to embed.