Re: Scripting!

[David Chisnall]

On 1 May 2014, at 01:21, Kevin Ingwersen <ingwie2000@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Is it even possible to use a scripting language, based on ObjC syntax, 
> outside of OS X?

You should look at the LanguageKit Framework for Étoilé.  This provides an AST 
interpreter, JIT compiler, and AOT compiler (compilers using LLVM on the back 
end) for languages targeting the GNUstep Objective-C runtime, including a 
dialect of Smalltalk and a JavaScript-like language.  Mathieu has been working 
on an OMeta front end for it, which (when finished) will make adding new front 
ends much easier.

Performance for LanguageKit is typically in the same ballpark as Objective-C, 
depending on what you're doing (floating point performance sucks, most other 
things are close, often faster than using ObjC with manual retain-release, but 
hopefully no one is doing that for new code in 2014).

If what you want is *exactly* Objective-C (which isn't a great scripting 
language, for various reasons), then you should look at Cling[1], which 
provides a REPL environment reusing the Clang parser and code generator.  I've 
never tried getting it to work with Objective-C, but it probably wouldn't be 
too much effort if it doesn't work already...

David

[1] http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling

-- Sent from my IBM 1620