A Mutable Log

A blog by Devendra Tewari

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Scripting for the .NET CLR

This post documents the pros and cons of some of the popular scripting options for the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR).

• CS-Script

  • Scripts are ECMA-compliant C#
  • Script is precompiled before execution, execution is as fast as compiled C#
  • Runs on .NET CLR and Mono
  • Provides capability to compile a script to DLL or executable
  • Can be embedded in a .NET application to provided scripting capability

• CsharpRepl

  • Built on top of the Mono.CSharp library
  • C# syntax
  • Scripts are interpreted, not as fast as compiled code
  • Readily available on most Linux distributions (mono-complete package on Debian based distributions)

• IronPython

  • Scripts are written in Python (2.7)
  • Useful if you already know Python
  • Can be embedded in a .NET application to provided scripting capability
  • As per established benchmarks, it performs better than CPython [aosabook.org]

• Other language options

  • IronRuby
  • IronScheme
  • IronJS