Post · bonfire.cafe

Benjamin Geer

@benjamingeer@piaille.fr · 13 hours ago

Some thoughts on what makes a good extension language: https://benjamingeer.name/en/post/extension-languages/

Many thanks to all who responded to my question!

@dabeaz @ricci @tealeg @eeide @screwlisp @cupofcode @sperbsen

Benjamin Geer

What makes a good extension language?

“Scripting languages are designed for gluing”, wrote John Ousterhout, the creator of Tcl, in 1998.1 What Ousterhout had in mind was writing an application in a scripting language and having it delegate certain functions to components written in system programming languages. A similar idea inspired the wrapper generator SWIG, developed for scientific computing.2 Nowadays, Python is widely used in this way, thanks to its vast ecosystem of modules written in system programming languages.

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Benjamin Geer

screwlisp

@screwlisp@gamerplus.org · 12 hours ago

@benjamingeer
I wonder if @ramin_hal9001 @khinsen have any thoughts on scripting, schemes and elisp viz your lua thoughts.

Recently, and I guess unpopularly, I want to view lisp as what I think Liskov coined to be a very high level implementation language (as an untenable idea), a high level language that has so many resources in it that you will not generally want "libraries".

Though embeddable common lisp is my usual compiler, so.
@dabeaz @ricci @tealeg @eeide @cupofcode @sperbsen

Konrad Hinsen

@khinsen@scholar.social · 9 hours ago

@screwlisp Back when I was doing Python advocacy for computational science, in the 2000s, part of my message was "don't embed Python into your app, turn your app into a Python library". The reason was composability.

Back then I was young and naïve and thought that "everyone in science should use Python", so it seemed normal for push for "Python library". Now that I don't use Python any more, the "Python library" approach looks stupid to me - it's a huge dependency.

@benjamingeer

David Beazley

@dabeaz@mastodon.social · 8 hours ago

@khinsen @screwlisp @benjamingeer It may only be a single datapoint, but I thought it was interesting to learn that many of the Python-controlled physics applications at Livermore had switched to Lua-embedded physics applications at some point.

I think a big part of this may have been a switch from "Python library" to "App with embedded scripting" partly due to difficulty in managing/deploying Python libraries.

Konrad Hinsen

@khinsen@scholar.social · 6 hours ago

@dabeaz Lua is a very worthy successor to Python in the role it had in its early days.

@screwlisp @benjamingeer

Andrew Dalke

@dalke@toots.nu · 1 hour ago

@khinsen @dabeaz @screwlisp @benjamingeer In the 1990s I used Tcl as the embedded language for a C++ program. I believed it was a more appropriate language for its task, in that non-CS trained grad students could write useful programs on it. I said that Python was harder to use and embed, but "better" as it was more amenable to writing maintainable libraries.

I now maintaining Python libraries atop ever-shifting foundations.

I agree - Lua is the better successor for that embedded use case.

Benjamin Geer

@benjamingeer@piaille.fr · 8 hours ago

@dabeaz That is very interesting! I was under the impression that some things were going in the opposite direction, e.g. Torch being superseded by PyTorch. @khinsen @screwlisp

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Konrad Hinsen

@khinsen@scholar.social · 9 hours ago

@screwlisp Unfortunately, I don't have a better universal recommendation. Apps with extension languages still feel like silos with weak composability. But there is no universal composition interface either. Language ecosystems are silos as well.

There's one argument in @benjamingeer's post that I agree with: it's not a language that's good or bad as an extension language, but a implementation with its ecosystem. Practicalities matter a lot.