A Tiny (1000 Lines), Fastish, Embeddable Scripting Language Can Be AOT Compiled

Nifty... I'm not really big on even lua myself. This seems to come in around 40kb for the runtime where luajit seems to be 140-160kb. I'm somewhat curious what targets the author is concerned with.

This isn't to be dismissive or anything, most of the applications I write seem to come in well over 2mb in size for rust and over 80mb for C# which are massive in comparison, so I'm interested in use cases. For that matter, I've been inclined to reach for JS as much as anything, though I've considered Lua before.

> garbage collection, I just link the Boehm GC. Not ideal, but good enough

It's worth noting that on 32-bit, the Boehm GC can have consistent issues [1] [2] [3] that make it worth avoiding for anything long-running. The Mono team implemented their own GC due to this. If a runtime is aiming to be useful on such systems, it may be worth implementing or using a less conservative GC.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29#Garbage_co...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3576396

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8152374/

Sweet, very impressed.

To be really usable, for embedded and otherwise, a well documented and ergonomic C API for bindings is needed though.

The closest I could find was "If you need to add more predefined functions, add them in intrinsics.h." I will take a look though, this seems really promising

EDIT: Looks to be pretty easy to tack an external registration mechanism onto intrinsics.h. Good to go then ..

.. Only two SO comments at this point .. come on folks :-)