Rhai is an embedded scripting language and evaluation engine for Rust that gives a safe and easy way
to add scripting to any application.
Targets and builds
- All CPU and O/S targets supported by Rust, including:
- WebAssembly (WASM)
no-std
- Minimum Rust version 1.57
Standard features
- Simple language similar to JavaScript+Rust with dynamic typing.
- Fairly efficient evaluation (1 million iterations in 0.3 sec on a single-core, 2.3 GHz Linux VM).
- Tight integration with native Rust functions and types, including getters/setters, methods and indexers.
- Freely pass Rust values into a script as variables/constants via an external Scope - all clonable Rust types are supported; no need to implement any special trait. Or tap directly into the variable resolution process.
- Built-in support for most common data types including booleans, integers, floating-point numbers (including Decimal), strings, Unicode characters, arrays (including packed byte arrays) and object maps.
- Easily call a script-defined function from Rust.
- Relatively little unsafe code (yes there are some for performance reasons).
- Few dependencies - currently only smallvec, num-traits, ahash, bitflags and smartstring.
- Re-entrant scripting engine can be made Send + Sync (via the sync feature).
- Compile once to AST form for repeated evaluations.
- Scripts are optimized (useful for template-based machine-generated scripts).
- Easy custom API development via plugins system powered by procedural macros.
- Function overloading and operator overloading.
- Dynamic dispatch via function pointers with additional support for currying.
- Closures (anonymous functions) that can capture shared values.
- Some syntactic support for object-oriented programming (OOP).
- Organize code base with dynamically-loadable modules, optionally overriding the resolution process.
- Serialization/deserialization support via serde (requires the serde feature).
- Support for minimal builds by excluding unneeded language features.
- A debugging interface.
Protected against attacks
- Don’t Panic guarantee - Any panic is a bug. Rhai subscribes to the motto that a library should never panic the host system, and is coded with this in mind.
- Sand-boxed - the scripting engine, if declared immutable, cannot mutate the containing environment unless explicitly permitted.
- Rugged - protected against malicious attacks (such as stack-overflow, over-sized data, and runaway scripts etc.) that may come from untrusted third-party user-land scripts.
- Track script evaluation progress and manually terminate a script run.
- Passes Miri.
For those who actually want their own language
- Use as a DSL.
- Disable certain language features such as looping.
- Further restrict the language by surgically disabling keywords and operators.
- Define custom operators.
- Extend the language with custom syntax.