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Comment by frio | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to use `Deno` underneath `Rust` so that the tools can still be written in Typescript and thus self-mutated without the compilation step (but I can still try to do clever things with V8 Isolates or similar). It's been an ugly experiment so far; I'm vaguely thinking a simpler model would be to just define a binary "API" and run tools by exec-ing binaries.

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I have to be honest and tell you that try to load such an heavy runtime as a scripting layer is not a great idea; at the same time I can tell you that I am working on another Rust project where I also needed scripting, and after three attempts I landed on rhai (https://rhai.rs/) (https://rhai.rs/book).

You might find it nice for pretty much all use cases except for high-performance scripting (so, if you are not try to build the entire logic entirely in rhai, you are going to be fine).

Yeah, it's been a bit of a dead end. I didn't want the heavy runtime but felt it was worth disproving after experimenting rather than ruling out off the bat. Even before getting it running, the dependency list alone was pretty discouraging, especially given the storm of supply chain attacks these days.

Rhai looks nice, I'll take a look, thanks! And good luck with Zerostack.

I was just going to suggest rhai. It's simple enough LLMs can easily write it with a little context, and you control the entire API so you can sandbox effectively without needing to resort to hacks with a JS interpreter etc.

I agree v8 and Deno seems very heavy handed and complex to integrate for scripting capabilities.

Have you considered Lua? It is tailor made for use cases like this. Creating an embedded host in Rust is trivial, the work lies in creating built-in functions for the script runtime so that the user scripts can do useful things to the environment.

Have you thought about Zig? If you limit it to CompTime, isn't that just a scripting language that happens to be compiled to binary?

Possibly, I'm not really interested in learning Zig though (or learning to embed it in Rust). I'm sure that'd be a cool project for someone else to try :).

That’s not how it works. Comptime Zig is Zig, not an embedded scripting language. You can’t run comptime code separately, it only runs as part of compiling a Zig program. Think of it like Rust macros.

Yes and no. It is just Zig, but that is the advantage. And compiling it to an special function that could work as an end seems to be a doable thing, so you would just have to have the compiler in your agent.

Why not WASM?

Unfamiliarity and I believe it requires a compile step. I’m at least familiar with Typescript and Deno so being able to embed them was an appealing idea :)

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