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dbohdan
embedded-scripting-languages
Languages & Compilers2016–2025
dbohdan / embedded-scripting-languages

embedded-scripting-languages

A list of embedded scripting languages

Languages & CompilersHardware & Embedded
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A list of embedded scripting languages

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:02:50 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-05-17 08:47:20 UTC to 2025-10-27 09:19:30 UTC.

012342016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
mattparas·Dec 3, 2023
Hopefully the linked README provides a general overview (I know I need to write some more documentation!), but Steel is an implementation of the scheme programming language (not entirely compliant yet, but aiming for R5RS and R7RS compliance). It can be used as a standalone language via the interpreter/repl (like Python or Racket), or it can be embedded inside applications, like Lua. There are hundreds (thousands, probably) of embeddable languages, each with their own flavor - see a list compiled here for example https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages Use cases are generally for either configuration, scripting, or plugins - so scripting in games, or adding extensions to your text editor without having to use FFI or RPC + serializing a bunch of data. The advantage it has over using dynamic libraries (in general) is it runs
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in the same process, and can access the internal data structures directly without a lot of ceremony involved. The downside is that it is typically not as fast as native code unless a JIT is involved. Javascript is an example of an embedded scripting, where the browser is the host application.
In Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
crabmusket·Jan 24, 2023Submission

Ask HN: Embeddable Value-Oriented Languages?

These days, applications need customisation. And instead of having software developers write custom features tied to specific tenants, it can be advantageous to provide ways to configure the software using data. There are a bunch of examples of these. Excel is obviously the canonical one; almost the entire purpose of a spreadsheet is to host small fragments of an embedded value-oriented programming language which calculates the values of cells. Other applications which lean on customisation as their entire purpose may provide entire programming languages. For example, Zapier lets you create zaps using Python or JavaScript code. What I'd like to know is, do you know of any minimal, well-documented languages which are oriented towards producing expressions - like Excel's calculation language - which can be embedded in web application fronte
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nds or backends? I think Lisp is still the canonical "code as data" version of this, and the question becomes just "which Lisp can I embed most conveniently?", or maybe "which Lisp has few enough features?" Other examples in the genre are JSON Logic[1] (which is essentially a Lisp written in JSON, which sounds like a nightmare, but may be fine for machine generated logic), Lua, which is of course another full programming language, or any number of custom scripting languages used in various places.[2] Even Dhall[3] or Nix[4] have some similarities in that they're value-oriented configuration languages, though they're quite esoteric. I don't imagine they're often used in embedded fashion. [1]: https://jsonlogic.com/ [2]: https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages [3]: https://dhall-lang.org/ [4]: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-language.html
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