Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

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Roslyn is very powerful, but it is still pretty cumbersome. At one point I spent quite a while trying to get a game scripting system akin to the way that Lua is commonly used working, and I just couldn't get it working fast enough to be viable. I essentially wanted to have a core C# engine that provided services, and then have it call an initialization function and a gameloop function that were defined in designated script files, and then all of my game code would also be written in other scripts; this way I could run things, edit the code on the fly, and hot-reload.

It's entirely possible that I just don't know what I'm doing well enough to do this correctly, but I just couldn't get it to do the kinds of things that I wanted from it. My sense is that it is really great for injecting custom code that is used rather infrequently. I've had good results using it for building out reporting systems that are pluggable.

I think ignorance is a pretty powerful argument to be made by any developer wanting to use Roslyn. The last few times I messed with it there was literally no documentation and everything I knew/know comes from reading headers, trial and error, and experimentation.

I feel defensive about calling it cumbersome though, and I can't imagine why something like your LUA vision isn't possible (though, I've never tried I just assumed someone would inevitably do this). For example, if World of Warcraft were to switch out their UI LUA extension system with C# I could totally imagine this being possible (though it'd be suicidal for their mod community). Likewise, if Unity were to begin using it for this kind of thing (if they don't already) I'd imagine it is possible.

We have some documentation now: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/roslyn-sdk/

would really appreciate bugs/comments on these docs pages of what else you would like to see.

Well, it's not cumbersome at all. The problem is really lack of real documentation and most importantly real world examples; About the performance, if you use the real scripting support for Roslyn , yeah, I think you'll have bad performance. But if you compile the code to memory at runtime and execute it like I did, it's pretty fast;

FWIW, I wrote effectively what you describe pre-Roslyn, using the old CSharpCompiler, and it was plenty fast enough for my own developer tolerances. I ended up going to a compile-on-startup mode instead, though.

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