Hi, I Just started working on a Emacs-inspired text editor in Rust.

Being insipred by Emacs, the most important part Is the possibiliy to implement new components.

My ideas were:

Rust-based scripting language, like Rhai

RustPython (slower, but more compatible and lots of people know Python)

PyO3 (Bigger executable and not that fast)

Wasm/Wasi (Cross-platform, but I don't know if the compatibility with Rust's hosted functions and structs is good)

Other binded language, like V8, Lua or SpiderMonkey

Compiled plugins, like .so or .DLL (Fast, but not compatible; there should be Rust plugin frameworks for implementing this, but I don't remember the name)

The elements to analyze are: speednees (consider it's a text editor, so...), easy-to-develop and Cross-platform (if possible, not that important), but the possibility to execute functions in the host Rust program is EXTREMELY important.

Thoughts?

Thanks in Advance.

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[–] aloso@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can recommend Lua. It is easy to learn, and easy to embed in a Rust program. With LuaJIT, it should be pretty fast, too.

Of course you can also embed a JavaScript runtime, but then your executable will probably be 50 MB larger. And I'm not a fan of Python.

[–] djtech@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Being honest, I don't really like Lua's syntax, while I love his embeddability.

A JS runtime is way too big in my opinion.

PyO3 + Python is also big, but a little big smaller beaucse the interpreter isn't embedded.

I am currenctly experimenting with both Python and WASM.