[rasmusfabbe]

Exactly. Node.js is—just like Python, Ruby or LUA—an embed-able general-purpose JS runtime. You can simply link with libnode. Kod then uses a mix of libdispatch and libev constructs to perform inter-thread communication. The code for doing this is fairly orthogonally designed and can be found in the KNode* and node* source files.

[mahmud]

I don't think anything is like Lua when it comes to embedding; I mean, it's what, 100k? Hard to top that.

[roel_v]

I don't quite understand - are you saying that the lower the amount of lines of code, the easier it is to embed? Or better in some other way? Or something else entirely?

[mahmud]

Lua strikes a very sweet balance, almost to its own detriment: you have an Schemish language, with huge user-base, at 100k. OTOH, since Lua is always an option, people put off using it until "necessary", and start their apps in cruft like C and C++.

The ease of embedding is not a matter of sice; both Python and Tcl are trivial to embed, almost as much as Lua. But they come with relatively larger footprint, and the quality of the languages themselves are not up to par (i.e. not "Schemish" enough)

This is ALL subjective anyway; by quality I mean what would please me personally. I already code in my ideal language.

[roel_v]

Yes, Python was going to be my counterexample - it's very easy to embed yet much bigger than 100k lines.

The 'not Schemish enough' I don't understand - unless it's a passive aggressive way of saying that anything that is not Scheme or Scheme-like is not a good language, which is a boring discussion I'm not going to go into. Well unless there is a reason that Scheme-like languages have some specific advantages that make them especially suited to being embedded, in which case I'd like to learn.

Regarding size, I don't think that's much of a problem today (leaving aside embedded or mobile dev, which I don't think we're talking about). Maybe a huge VM can cause issues in some specific circumstances, but much of the size of 'bigger' languages is going to be in the standard library anyway, in which case it's preferable for a user to have a large enough selection to work with, depending on the application domain.

[nfg]

> Yes, Python was going to be my counterexample - it's very easy to embed yet much bigger than 100k lines.

He's not talking about lines of code – the lua interpreter/runtime is only approximately 150kB in size.

[silentbicycle]

More like 200kb (17kloc), but that's still not bad. Heck, SQLite is ~500kb, and does anybody hesitate to embed that?

Lua has a pretty nice C API, too.

[die_sekte]

io[1] has 10k lines and is embeddable. It's somewhat similiar to Lua.

[1]: http://www.iolanguage.com/

[silentbicycle]

Lua's performance is dramatically better, and it has a more mature toolchain.

I'm interested in io, too, but I've had trouble even getting it to build on BSD.

[masklinn]

Tcl/TinyTcl, IO