Alternate scripting lanaguage for IO

[matthewfl]

Currently ilang is far behind other programming languages out there in terms of features and ease at which a task can be accomplished. Currently, if someone wants to preform some io task, say reading email over imap, they will have to custom write a module in C++, which means that they are going to have to find and integrate a C++ imap module. The alternate that I am proposing that another scripting language is embedded into ilang, so that it can be used to handle all of the i/o interfaces. This would mean that someone could possibly use a python or node module to preform the imap manipulation, or write a small (~25 lines ideally) wrapper around already existing libraries to make them capable.

Feature	Nodejs	Python
Speed	v8 with Jit	Bytecode
IO model	Event loop	Threads
Library	more "pure" js libraries & thus interfaces are often reimplemented on top of TCP with various quality	Tend to wrap C libraries that complete a given task
Conflicting library deps	node_modules dir is used to allow multiple versions of a dep to be loaded at one time	does not support more then one version of a library out of the box
Language features	Prototype based system, weak typing	class based, kwargs support on functions
Embedding api	Would require minial changes to internals, but mostly v8	Supports an embedding api

[matthewfl]

Sample node:

var requests = require('requests');
var ilang = require('ilang');

exports.request = function(args) {
  var ret = ilang.promise();
  requests(args, function(err, resp) {
    if(err)
      ret.reject(err); // idk if want to use reject? as then the error handling
    else
      ret.resolve(resp);
  });
  return ret; // ilang will automatically recognize an ilang promise
};

Sample using ilang:

from i import node
from i import promise

_http_request = node.require('requests');
request = {|Object args|
  ret = promise.promise.new(); // should ilang importing classes specifically
  _http_request(args, {|NotNull err| ret.reject(err); } + {|err, resp| ret.resolve(resp) });
  return ret.wait(); // blocks until the promise is resolved
};