I want to allow the users of my project be able to write the driving logic, while I provide the tools. What are some embedded scripting languages in Rust that can be sandboxed and are easy for absolute beginners?

edit: Thanks for all of your answers, I decided to go with lua using mlua

  • it_a_me ( it_a_me@literature.cafe ) 
    10·
    2 years ago

    The most battletested way is via bindings to other languages. Ex. mlua with luau sandboxing Or Javascript via v8 or deno_core

    There are also a few languages implemented in rust like rhai

    There is also the option of compiling the user code to wasm and using wasmtime to run it

  • TehPers ( TehPers@beehaw.org ) English
    10·
    2 years ago

    You can embed Lua pretty easily using a few different libraries. One I liked in particular was mlua. Lua is tiny, usually sufficiently fast, and easy to learn.

    Otherwise, there are some others like Rhai, but there may be fewer resources available for users if you go with a less popular language.

    • asudox ( AsudoxDev@programming.dev ) OP
      3·
      2 years ago

      Thanks for this. Seems like I’ll go with Lua. I actually did try Rhai before posting this and it did work pretty easily and had a very nice and convenient plugin system. But it had no LSP and on top of that, it wasn’t as easy as Lua.

    • asudox ( AsudoxDev@programming.dev ) OP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Thanks for the suggestion. Though JS itself is a pretty weird language and has some weird behaviours, I’d rather not use it. It’s also a bit too advanced for my use case. (somewhat simple control flow, maybe some math, etc.)

  • BB_C ( BB_C@programming.dev ) 
    2·
    2 years ago

    Another meme answer: nu.

    I never actually used nu for anything. But I’ve been thinking (unironically) that nu with its built-in from_json and to_json can be interesting.

    The use-case I had in mind is not games or anything like that, but some system or dev tools that traditionally utilized shell scripts, but are moving towards better languages like python. So I thought a single binary that embeds nu, but also has a lot of sub-commands that implement a lot of sub-tasks in Rust directly, and with JSON used as an exchange format, the combination can be interesting.

    Now that I think about it more, this can work in both directions, with main execution being in nu (what I had in mind), or in Rust.

    nu even has an lsp server, so the development experience should theoretically be good.

  • SorteKanin ( SorteKanin@feddit.dk ) 
    2·
    2 years ago

    One more vote for using WASM. Using WASM has the benefit of allowing the user to use almost whatever language they want, as long as it can compile to WASM. So the user doesn’t have to learn some bespoke scripting-specific language.