Having spent the last few weeks working with ExtJs, I'm been drinking quite a bit of Javascript Coolaid. (Actually being british, I never understood that phase, but I guess most people understand it these days.)
Doing all this a while back led me to investigate General Javascript engines, I had this weird vision that Javascript and Gtk may make an interesting combination.
As I mentioned in my last post about testing code the whole write-save-(compile)-run-test would in an ideal world be reduced to write-save-test. And since very few languages actually allow you to redefine objects, object methods, functions etc after you have actually run the application (without weird add-on etc), Javascript is pretty interesting in this area.
Anyway there are quite a few EMCAscript engines out there, most of them in C, and a few in other Bytecode or even scripting languages. But only one that is written in that new little magical language D!...
dmdscript, (also on dsource as walnut with a few hacks and the start of a new version), Has some serious benefits over all the other implementations.
- The source code is clear, readable, and not cluttered with memory allocation crap. - It's fast - It's small = small again making it easier to understand - It's free of any major dependancies (apart from the compiler.. dmd or gdc ) - Writing extensions is (at least in theory) simple, and not full with learning about crazy cryptic macro's or custom memory allocation stuff (sound like anyone's favourite language?)
The only downside... - Dont expect alot of support, It looks like the project is one of Walter's little whims, that he lost interest in a bit. And licence-wise I'm not sure if GPL is the perfect licence for the project.. - but that's just a gut feeling, I'm far from a Licencing expert, but I suspect using it as a add-on for another project that is not GPL would be difficult. And I'm not sure how adding LGPL to a GPL application works either... Anyway..
I had a small amount of free time at the end of last week, Just having nailed the last few bugs in a project. So I thought I'd investigate dmdscript extensions on the pre-cursor to looking at modifying the GtkD bindings generator to create the dmdscript bindings...
First stage investigation, gave a little bit of imformation from the dmdscript site, along with a short note on the dsource Walnut project subversion server. But unfortunatly It's not really enough to get you started, and there are now 'Step by step' instructions on writing extensions, or adding Objects.
So here's my step by step guide to adding an object with methods to dmdscript... - in the extended entry..
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