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I'm looking for an embedded scripting language.

I don't need anything fancy, just basic constructs like conditionals, loops, logic and arithmetic operations etc.

I have the following requirements

  1. Thread friendly - i.e. without "global interpreter lock" (python is out for this reason)
  2. Cheap "interpreter instance" creation - I will have potentially 100s of these. I understand that lua creates a separate gc thread per every Lua_State which means lua is out.
  3. No gc or refcounting or any other "on the fly" memory management. It should simply destroy any variables once the script is executed. Again both python and lua are out.
  4. And of course it should be fast and have low memory footprint.
  5. Should work on windows, GNU/Linux and MacOS X

Any help is highly appreciated.

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closed as off topic by Bo Persson, hjpotter92, kiamlaluno, darkajax - Iram Aguirre, hohner Mar 12 '13 at 20:55

Questions on Stack Overflow are expected to relate to programming within the scope defined by the community. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about reopening questions here.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
    
I think it will be extremely hard to find a modern scripting language without a GC or refcounted memory model. I would personally recommend Google v8 - but then there is the question of threading. You can run scripts in separate threads concurrently with Isolates, but you can't share anything JavaScript'ish between them. Hence they are Isolate'd. –  Sim Mar 12 '13 at 18:02

1 Answer 1

up vote 7 down vote

Reconsider Lua:

  1. Yes.
  2. Yes. Lua does not create any OS threads at all.
  3. Garbage collection does not start until you've created lots of objects. You can simply turn it off. To destroy all variables once the script is executed, simply close the state.
  4. Yes.
  5. Yes.
share|improve this answer
    
2. On current OSes, native threads are very lightweight. It then depends on what runs underneath... –  vonbrand Mar 12 '13 at 20:26
    
Does closing the state ensure finalizers are called? I always wondered about that. –  Cubic Mar 12 '13 at 22:03
    
@Cubic, yes, it does. See lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#lua_close . –  lhf Mar 12 '13 at 22:11