Re: Ravi - almost a year old plus thoughts on what's next

[Paul K <paul@...>]

Hi Dibyendu,

> Ravi is today a year old!

Congratulations! It's an interesting project I keep an eye on even
though I don't currently use it.

> b) The second thing I miss as a user is an IDE that I can use for
> developing/debugging Ravi code. This is pretty important for the user
> community I have in mind - i.e. - users who are not programmers by
> profession, but will use Ravi as a scripting language to enhance the
> application. I do not yet know how best to tackle this - perhaps I
> should look at enhancing ZeroBrane Studio to support Ravi. I do not
> know how much effort that will be.

Depending on what exactly you want to do, you may already have
everything you need in ZBS. The IDE already supports development and
debugging for Lua-based languages, for example, GSL-shell (extends Lua
syntax) and Moonscript (compiles to Lua). The debugger also includes
code mapping support, which is used in Moonscript to map Lua line
numbers (that debug hook is fired on) to Moonscript source code to
make breakpoints and other debugging aspects to work.

If you want to try running/debugging Ravi scripts from ZBS, then
gsl-shell interpreter may be a good starting point
(https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBraneStudio/blob/master/interpreters/gslshell.lua);
you may then wrap it into a plugin as it was done for Moonscript
(https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBranePackage/blob/master/moonscript.lua).
You can see some screenshots and details on how this works here:
http://notebook.kulchenko.com/zerobrane/moonscript-debugging-with-zerobrane-studio
and http://notebook.kulchenko.com/zerobrane/gsl-shell-debugging-with-zerobrane-studio;
you can see that in both cases ZBS can debug scripts that look nothing
like "standard" Lua and in the case of Moonscript, you can use
Moonscript expressions in the Watch panel and the Remote console.

Let me know if you need help with any of this.

Paul.