this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
38 points (97.5% liked)
Rust
6127 readers
14 users here now
Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.
Wormhole
Credits
- The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Many languages can be compiled to wasm, and it's quite easy to load and run wasm from rust
That way you could give the user multiple options, they could write it in rust, c, c++, javascript, etc
Although the OP has already decided to go with Lua, if anyone else looking at this thread is considering their options for making a plugin system, WASM/WASI is an excellent choice - mostly because it allows users to use Python (a favorite among programming newbies) along with any other language that compiles to WebAssembly (which will eventually be all languages).
You can even use something like Extism which is purpose-built as a drop-in library for creating a plugin system with WASM plugins, or you can use other runtime options like Wasmtime (built in Rust, from the ByteCode Alliance - where the WASI spec is being developed) or the WasmEdge runtime (built in C++, which is a CNCF project and is already being used in areas like eBPF to help users build Linux Kernel extensions).
In short, if you're building a project that has to be maintained long-term and you need a plugin system, then choose WebAssembly - you can't go wrong.
Cheers!
WASM is a bit overkill and is also complicated. I need a simple scripting language that won't stress the users out. As mentioned in my post, I expect them to be absolute beginners.
I didn't mean that the users would write wasm, just that they could write it in some language, then your program would compile it to wasm and run it
Gives some flexibility as to the choice of language and it runs sandboxed
yeah no no, who writes wasm by hand?
it's just that this interoperability with all languages is a bit overkill. I also don't know how I would expose a rust struct that has methods in wasm