(Re)Implementing Wren in tiny coffee

I’m working on re-implement Wren in tiny coffee, i started with Wren support first, but as i’m more familiar with Lua, and had more material on internet, i decided to focus on it. But as things seems getting fine with the Lua wrap, i decided to work again in the Wren wrap.

In the beginning i was thinking in have two exe options, with Lua or Wren, but since i want to make the game editor and tools with Lua, i decided to make it mandatory. And with Lua being mandatory, i decided to distribute the exe with Wren too. But how to determine how language to use? I thought in many solutions (detect for main.lua or main.wren, make Lua default and load Wren from Lua script), but decided to go with the easier one, just let user choose it :v. By default it always load Lua first, and you need to specify Wren in the config.json:

{
	"name": "project",
	"lang": "wren"
}

I writed an init.lua to init Lua code and still writing an init.wren.

For now, tico supports LuaJIT and Lua 5.4, still deciding if i distribute the 2 exe, or just LuaJIT, and if user wants, he compiles with Lua 5.4 from the repo.

I’ll divide Wren wrap in the same modules as Lua.

• tico.graphics
• tico.audio
• tico.filesystem
• tico.json
• tico.window
• tico.input

And as in Wren everything is a class, each module implement their own classes:

• tico.graphics
  • Graphics
  • Image
  • Canvas
  • Shader
  • Color
• tico.audio
  • Audio
  • Sound
• tico.filesystem
  • Filesystem
  • File
• tico.json
  • JSON
• tico.window
  • Window
• tico.input
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse
  • Joystick
  • Input

A limitation that Wren has is in yours Map classes/objects, we can’t deal with it in the C API, and this has impacts in my JSON class. In Lua, i can encode Lua tables in JSON string and decode JSON string in Lua tables, in Wren i still need to figure out how to do it, as i can’t easily create/read Maps from C side. Reading the roadmap, they’re planning working on that from 0.4.0 (the moment i’m writing it, the last stable version is the 0.3.0). And it will be a game changer.

But that’s it, Wren is a growing language, lightweight, very fast, and comes only with the necessary, and i just need to learn how to deal with some aspects of the language.