It is an excellent book and one of the canonical texts on the subject. My only suggestion for the "Lox" language would be to include an implementation of arrays, and preferably also hash/dict arrays. Other than that, the book contains everything you need to know about implementing a programming language.

and he wrote Game Programming Patterns [0]

[0] https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

This is awesome. Thank you for sharing. I have been working on a small interpreted language for shell scripts with lots of help from Claude Code. The main idea is to automatically generate the cli interface for the scripts based on function definitions. However, I'm far from a programming languages expert, so I've been a bit hesitant to share my work. Going to give this book a read this week to see how far I am. Thank you!

Is Bob still involved (in Wren)?

I thought his focus was Dart these days given being employed by Google.

Knowing this is the author makes me 1000% more interested in Wren. What a great book!

Yeah, my understanding is that the bytecode interpreter in the second half of the book is essentially a stripped-down version of the Wren virtual machine.

That's unusual that you struggled to build Lua. Lua is primarily C89, and used on non-POSIX microcontrollers for example. There are some optional bits of the standard library you would have to leave out - module loading uses dlopen(). This is done simply by defining the right feature macros for your target environment: https://www.lua.org/source/5.4/luaconf.h.html

You may also be interested in this project: https://github.com/fengari-lua/fengari

Wow, I really went into a rabbithole after opening up your hackernews profile seeing indiebits and remembering my time scouring your github awesome tunneling page and then I went to discourse forum and somehow found new resources about self hosting and saw yunohost and others as well all in matter of minutes.

Thank you for your service in self-hosting. I had so much fun trying to break nats with awesome tunneling projects and I even created my own but it actually requires a custom patch of ssh with pinggy to work without nat (let me know if you are interested, as I had discovered this a year ago but I just am a little lazy haha)

I have created only one issue on the awesome tunneling but let me tell you some of them don't work in nat's/broke

https://freedomhascost.bearblog.dev/

Just created the bearblog post, not sure why the name but just wanted to say thank you and wanted to share any knowledge I have in the process as well to strengthen the hacking/tinkering community. Thanks once again

Also its just a bit of a coincidence that we are talking on a wren page as I was literally reading about wren once again and playing with it just yesterday and joined their discord server yesterday or day before that to tinker with it. Wren is really elegant and I feel like I want to write more software which integrates it instead of lua as a thought experiment as well and wasm seems a cool idea too in that regards.

> a general equivalent to the C++ `extern "C" { ... }` thing

That sounds a lot like what LuaJIT’s FFI provides: https://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html

I really like the sound of Wren, but you may also want to look into Squirrel, it's basically Lua re-imagined/reimplemented but without all the Lua quirks and with C-style syntax (but it still has optional lua-style prototypes, which means it ends up very similar to Javascript). Its embedding API is largely a copy of Lua's. There is also an active fork called Quirrel that makes the language more like Python.

There are loads of scripting languages but very few of them have an embedding API as powerful as Lua or Squirrel's. (My benchmarks: what's the overhead of a userdata pointer? Is there a proper debug API? Can you suspend a co-routine from inside a called C function? Very few languages even have coroutines.) Last I looked at it years ago, Wren was one of the best. Of course, the most featureful embedding API of all belongs to LuaJIT.

Yeah, Lua's implementation is fantastic - but the language is "quirky" at best.

Wren looks a bit more orthodox, although it's heavily built around class-based OOP - you can't even define and call a top-level function without extra syntax to (1) turn it into an object, and (2) call one of that object's methods:

  var sayHello = Fn.new { System.print("hello") }
  sayHello.call() //> hello

Wow that’s an interesting list. Sorta of surprising with Raku beating out Perl. Nim is also in the top 10, nice!

you probably meant metaclass and according to the doc classes inheritance don't have surprising behaviors. And about the metaclass not being inherited here are the implication:

  ...In more prosaic terms, this means that static methods are not inherited.

I think I read that Wren's creator deliberately avoided "the metaclass hierarchy matches the class hierarchy" (as used in Smalltalk and taken to an extreme in Ruby [0]) because the authors of Smalltalk have come to regret that design?

I'd be interested to hear more details about the issues with that approach. I've not had any problems with it, and occasionally found it useful. For example, in one situation I needed a hierarchy of static constructors that matched the hierarchy of instance constructors.

[0] Ruby also has "the meta-metaclass hierarchy matches the metaclass hierarchy" and "the meta-meta-metaclass hierarchy..." ad infinitum. It's a beautiful design really - it means that in Ruby (unlike Smalltalk), it's always true that "the superclass of the metaclass is the metaclass of the superclass".

Edit: Here's the quote I was remembering:

> My hunch is that we don't want metaclass inheritance. From talking to a few old Smalltalkers, they generally consider it a mistake there. Also, Java, C++, C#, etc. have semantics more similar to not allowing metaclass inheritance (in other words, static methods aren't inherited), and it seems to work well there.

https://groups.google.com/g/wren-lang/c/LkKg51fEUg4/m/0GOK0P...