cwal Central Documentation Hub
Sidebar: since the days of old, most non-API cwal docs are in the project's wiki pages, but the hope is to eventually migrate the "more relevant" wiki pages into so-called "embedded doc" format (like this one). Though the wiki pages are mostly quite old, they're not entirely outdated. This doc format, however, is more flexible than the wiki.
cwal, the Scripting Engine Without a Language, pronounced "Sea Wall," is exactly what the name says: it's a "language-agnostic" scripting engine. It's implemented in portable C99, intended to be used as the basis for creating scripting languages. It was borne from the idea that (A) tinkering with scripting languages has been a hobby of mine since the early 2000s, (B) creating one from scratch each time is a huge bummer, and (C) much of the basis, specifically the memory management and data type model, can be moved into a common framework. cwal is the (C) part of that equation. cwal started life as a fork of a JSON library in mid-2012 and has been actively developed and maintained since then.
Though cwal is ostensibly language-agnostic, its design does imply a certain "shape" of languages. As cwal originated as a fork of a library for working with JSON data, its core data types are very JavaScript-esque, and that general type of language (without the full weight of JS) is its primary target. It can, however, fit just as well into batch-like languages which look nothing at all like JS. Client languages/applications are in no way required to expose all of its data types to the language.
Docs still to write or port from the wiki (in no particular order):
- Overview of the data type model
- Scoping and memory management
- All The Things
For a one-person project (as in "written by" one person as well as "used by" one person), cwal and the related client code included in its source repository have an astounding amount of non-API documentation: as of this writing (2022-04-12) approximately 1.18MB of markdown-format docs spanning 24350 non-blank lines, most of it belonging to...
cwal Languages: