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Cwal: Scripting Engine Without a Language

A Language cwal (pronounced "sea wall") is a scripting engine/garbage-collection library implemented in C (which is where the "c" comes from - its original name was "sewal"). cwal itself does not provide a scripting language, only the pieces needed for a custom script parser to manage its memory, scoping, variables, a value type system with which to communicate values between script code and native code, etc.

The verdict is still out as to whether cwal can really scale to be able to be useful in any "really interesting" scripting work, but has been shown to at least be viable for such tasks as creating web sites. Its GC mechanism does have a couple "death trap" cases which clients should avoid to keep memory costs down, but in practice it performs remarkably well. In my experience with other scripting engines, in such cases client code needs to add safeguards against potentially incorrect destruction order.

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