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junon | on: One year of Roto, a compiled scripting language for Rust
Maybe the authors are here to answer this.

The syntax is of course very Rusty, which is cool. However, a sort of obvious question comes to mind - what is the benefit of this over just writing rust, then? Just because the compile times are shorter?

EDIT: should mention I understand why embedded scripting languages exist, having embedded Lua many times. And I love a lot of these features, but to me having an embedded scripting language should simplify the language/API surface area instead of mirroring it almost 1:1. That's what I'm a bit undersold on.

berkes | parent | next
I'm author of a rust based task manager (not (yet) FLOSS, unfortunately), where we needed "pluggable task sources" (jira, github, trello, etc).

In our setup, the "sources" are more like configuration. Whereas the core, the business logic, is more like code.

Typically, one would configure with e.g. YAML. As we can see in many projects, that have a DSL, in yaml (k9s, GitHub actions, ansible, etc). But, rather than inventing another DSL in yaml, we realized we do need some logic, something very poorly expressed in yaml. And we went for Lua.

Long story to say: if your config typically has some logic in it, it makes sense to go for an embedded scripting language to provide it, rather than building it into the core domain, or to invent yet-another-yaml-amalgation (yayamla?)

abc42 | parent | next
Same reason why several projects have integrated Lua to their runtime over the past 30 years. Extensibility and hot reloading.
Philpax | parent
Hot-reloading. You can edit your logic without rebuilding and restarting the host application; this cuts your iteration time from minutes to seconds, especially if the application is in a state that would need to be recreated.