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I'm wondering how munificent feels about Squirrel[1]. It seems like Wren is looking to fill the same niche that Squirrel fits. So I guess my question is, how ar

I'm wondering how munificent feels about Squirrel[1]. It seems like Wren is looking to fill the same niche that Squirrel fits. So I guess my question is, how are they different, or, how is Wren better? [1] - http://squirrel-lang.org/ http://squirrel-lang.org/

munificent 12y ago
This is a great question! I probably can't do the answer justice in a HN comment, and I don't know Squirrel as well as I'd like to, but here's some random thoughts. At a high level, Wren and Squirrel have a lot of overlap. They're both dynamically-typed embedded scripting languages with an eye towards games and a syntax that tries to look more familiar to someone from the C tradition. Some differences are: - Wren is much younger. That means it's much less mature, but it also has less baggage and cruft. - Squirrel is a good bit more complex than Wren in general. I'm trying really hard to keep Wren small and simple and have a minimal set of orthogonal, combinable features. Squirrel has a larger baked-in feature set. This means squirrel sometimes has multiple ways to accomplish the same goal: generators and threads, classes and tables, etc. With Wren I'm trying to get as much mileage from as few features as I can. (For example, Wren uses fibers for error-handling.) - Squirrels tables are pretty similar to JS objects and Lua tables, so some of Squirrel has that prototype-y feel. That's kind of cool, but it also brings in some stuff I don't like. For example, I think Squirrel has the problem that Lua and JS have where "this" may not be bound to the object that you think it is because it doesn't have a real method/function separation. In Wren, "this" does exactly what you want, even in closures. - Squirrel is written in C++. Wren is pure C99. - Squirrel is primarily ref-counted with an opt-in mark-sweep GC (to clean up cycles, I assume). Wren is straight mark-sweep (though I anticipate going to incremental at some point for latency). - Squirrel uses 8-bit or 16-bit character strings. Wren uses UTF-8 (or, at least, it will as that gets fleshed out more). If you want something stable and usable today with all the features you could want, Squirrel is probably a good fit. If you're looking for something that feels a little more minimal and hews to a more modern aesthetic, that's what I'm aiming for with Wren.
- phyllostachys 12y ago
  > Squirrel is written in C++. Wren is pure C99. Awesome. My primary interest in Lua and Squirrel was to embed a scripting language in a C environment on a microcontroller. This is perfectly doable (and has been done before) but Lua is particularly attractive because it is written in ANSI C. I think it is interesting how similar embedded systems devs and game devs view their code with an eye towards performance and size. It is nice because embedded systems typically don't use newer languages and the developers tend to never move away from C as the language of choice (sometimes it seems like everyone is stuck in the 80s or 90s).
  - munificent 12y ago
    I believe (but have no proof) that Wren is more amenable to running on a microcontroller than Lua or Squirrel. Wren has a more compact representation for instances of classes and simpler/faster method dispatch. It's still duck typed, but it gets closer to statically-typed language where an instance is a simple in-place array of fields and field access is just a pointer offset.

munificent 12y ago

This is a great question! I probably can't do the answer justice in a HN comment, and I don't know Squirrel as well as I'd like to, but here's some random thoughts. At a high level, Wren and Squirrel have a lot of overlap. They're both dynamically-typed embedded scripting languages with an eye towards games and a syntax that tries to look more familiar to someone from the C tradition. Some differences are: - Wren is much younger. That means it's much less mature, but it also has less baggage and cruft. - Squirrel is a good bit more complex than Wren in general. I'm trying really hard to keep Wren small and simple and have a minimal set of orthogonal, combinable features. Squirrel has a larger baked-in feature set. This means squirrel sometimes has multiple ways to accomplish the same goal: generators and threads, classes and tables, etc. With Wren I'm trying to get as much mileage from as few features as I can. (For example, Wren uses fibers for error-handling.) - Squirrels tables are pretty similar to JS objects and Lua tables, so some of Squirrel has that prototype-y feel. That's kind of cool, but it also brings in some stuff I don't like. For example, I think Squirrel has the problem that Lua and JS have where "this" may not be bound to the object that you think it is because it doesn't have a real method/function separation. In Wren, "this" does exactly what you want, even in closures. - Squirrel is written in C++. Wren is pure C99. - Squirrel is primarily ref-counted with an opt-in mark-sweep GC (to clean up cycles, I assume). Wren is straight mark-sweep (though I anticipate going to incremental at some point for latency). - Squirrel uses 8-bit or 16-bit character strings. Wren uses UTF-8 (or, at least, it will as that gets fleshed out more). If you want something stable and usable today with all the features you could want, Squirrel is probably a good fit. If you're looking for something that feels a little more minimal and hews to a more modern aesthetic, that's what I'm aiming for with Wren.

phyllostachys 12y ago
> Squirrel is written in C++. Wren is pure C99. Awesome. My primary interest in Lua and Squirrel was to embed a scripting language in a C environment on a microcontroller. This is perfectly doable (and has been done before) but Lua is particularly attractive because it is written in ANSI C. I think it is interesting how similar embedded systems devs and game devs view their code with an eye towards performance and size. It is nice because embedded systems typically don't use newer languages and the developers tend to never move away from C as the language of choice (sometimes it seems like everyone is stuck in the 80s or 90s).
- munificent 12y ago
  I believe (but have no proof) that Wren is more amenable to running on a microcontroller than Lua or Squirrel. Wren has a more compact representation for instances of classes and simpler/faster method dispatch. It's still duck typed, but it gets closer to statically-typed language where an instance is a simple in-place array of fields and field access is just a pointer offset.