What Implementation Language Should We Use?

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Personally, my strongest languages are C and Lua, but I feel that a project like this deserves something more intrinsically portable.

• JVM based languages (I suggest Scala) are the "classic" portable choice, but that would mean using the JVM, which inevitably means coming into contact with the Java Standard Library.
• Python is popular and portable, I'm not so convinced about how well it'll work with binary files, or its general performance.
• Finally, I've heard good things about Mono/.NET based languages, and C# is both popular and broadly familiar.

What are your thoughts, can you think of any better options? Should we just go with C?

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From IRC:

[21:43:31] <tmillc> I didn't have fun when I used java, so vote no to JVM. I liked ruby more than python in my brief survey, so meh. I would probably be employable with some C# so eh. Really I'll go along with whatever.

[llllvvuu]

My feels:

• Not so keen on targeting JVM, but if so then at least do it with Scala or Clojure
• Something like this doesn't seem resource bounded, Python seems fine. The way to write Python code which isn't dreadfully slow is to use a good library with native code backend. Although this might mess with portability
• I'm good with C/Lua
• I feel meh about .NET

The only parser-generators I've worked with for designing compilers are ANTLR and Happy. I don't know how deep into parsing we need to go but the frameworks are pretty much all the same anyway

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• JVM: I agree that if we use JVM there is no force that could make me use Java. I've some limited experience with Scala, Its acceptable.
• Python: I guess that covers the performance angle, but how easily can you manipulate binary data with python? EDIT: apprently struct exists.
• C/Lua: it might be the "simplist" option, considering what we need to do. and tbh we can probably do most of what we need with the standard library which is reasonably portable. I don't see much use for lua in this one though.
• Mono/.Net: I have no particular attachment, but what I've heard suggests this might be a decent usecase for it, and its more tempting than Java/JVM…

While we're still discussing the form of the language, I don't see a need to get particularly fancy. so parsing shouldn't be a problem for the language itself is concerned. the ingame parser is a different story, but we probably aren't going to find an off-the-shelf parser for that, and even if we did I don't like our chances of getting it to spit out somethign we can use in an arbitary bytecode (Glulx et al).

[enitiz]

How about Elixir?

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Sounds like it runs on the Erlang VM. While I suppose thats technically portable, I do remember it being a bit of a chore to set up, which isn't great for what is meant primarily as end-user software.

Correct me if I have the wrong impression of Erlang/Elixir.

[enitiz]

That's a good point. I'm not too familiar with Elixir myself (it seems to be getting some traction lately). I would investigate a bit on this as well.