Choosing embedded scripting language for C++

Question

I want to choose an embedded scripting language that i will use on C++. It should connect a database such as Oracle. My host application is a server application. That will pass

Answer 1

Lua is intended to be an embedded language and has a simple API. Python and Ruby are much more general purpose and are (for embedding at least) significantly more complicated. This alone would lead me to using Lua.

Answer 2

You might be interested in ObjectScript

ObjectScript, OS for short, is a new programming language. It's free, cross-platform, lightweight, embeddable and open-source. It combines the benefits of multiple languages, including: JavaScript, Lua, Ruby, Python and PHP. OS features the syntax of Javascripts, the "multiple results" feature from lua, syntactic shugar from Ruby as well as magic methods from PHP and Ruby - and even more!

Minimal program used ObjectScript could be like this

#include <objectscript.h>
using namespace ObjectScript;
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    OS * os = OS::create(); // craete ObjectScript instance
    os->require("main.os"); // run ObjectScript program
    os->release();          // release the ObjectScript instance
    return 0;
}

Answer 3

Lua is already mentioned and using luabind will give you a more c++ style interface.
You could also take a look at chaiscript. It was more designed to fit into c++.

Answer 4

I've had a lot of success adding embedded scripting to my C++ applications using AngelScript. I've found it very easy to bind and the syntax to be very comfortable, but it depends on your target audience. I found Lua to be very fast and relatively easy to bind, but the syntax was a bit uncomfortable to me. AngelScript is very C/C++ like which I find very easy to understand and maintain, but to someone who spends more of their time working with CSS or HTML, might find it cumbersome and the language idioms might not translate well..

http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/

http://www.gamedev.net/forum/49-angelcode/

Just realized I had answered a similar question here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/191222/what-is-a-good-embeddable-language-i-can-use-for-scripting-inside-my-software

Answer 5

Save this as test.c:

#include <Python.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  Py_Initialize();
  PyRun_SimpleString("from time import time,ctime\n"
                     "print 'Today is',ctime(time())\n");
  Py_Finalize();
  return 0;
}

Run this command (if you have Python 2.7 installed):

gcc test.c -o test -I/usr/include/python2.7 -lpython2.7

Python has now been embedded. This took me under a minute, so I'm having a hard time understanding the claims of the "effort needed to embed it".

The example is from http://docs.python.org/extending/embedding.html.

I would suggest Python over Lua, even though Lua is also nice.

Answer 6

TCL would be another option for an easy to embed scripting language.

personally I'd go with the scripting language you and/or whoever will be using the scripting language is most familiar with already, especially if end users will be able to run custom scripts, you will need to know what, if any, languages they are familiar with in their business domain e.g. CAD/CAM people may know TCL, gaming people may know Lua etc.