Despite being interrupted almost every five to fifteen minutes, I managed to get the backends for embedding Lua and Python sorted. Today I would like to start getting into making it useful for something besides evaluating scripts.
Cassius needs to allow two things in order to be useful to me: invoking the embedded languages procedures from C++, and a way to export code to the embedded language. My interest, is whether or not it’s actually possible to accomplish that using fairly standard C++. I’m kind of hoping, to see just how far that can be pushed.
From experience, I’ve learned that you can expect something vaguely C89 compliant anywhere in the world but expecting C++ compilers to agree on all things template related, can be like asking a goldfish to walk on air – a bad idea! That’s why I rarely do more with templates than I have to. With how much compilers have changed in the last four years, I reckon it’s time.
Out of everything traditional C++ offers, most of it is just sub standard compared to newer languages. A lot of the code I’ve read over the years, I would hardly even count as C++ so much as C with classes, but people have developed reasons I guess. IMHO how C++ can interface with C code is a killer feature, that could be just as readily solved by adapting a C compiler to generate JNI glue code or some shit like that. Throwing on inheritance based OOP isn’t that killer in my books, when you look at languages like Ruby and Python. The real killer feature of C++ is what you can do with templates. While supporting simple generics are part of it, that could be done in C by (abusing) the pre processor and adjusting your Makefile. It’s the opportunities to get creative at compile time that make its it worth while, someday I really should see if any good books have been written on TMP in C++.
The way I look at it, macros make Common Lisp stand out from it’s younger peers, C++ templates make you drool, or curse compilers more frequently lol. Leveraging languages is why more than one programming language should exist.