Plugin support

[hellocatfood]

Please add support for people to write their own plugins for Goxel.

The benefit of this is that will allow people to write their own model format exporters e.g. #235

[guillaumechereau]

Yes this is something that I tried to do at some point (there is still a Lua and JS branch somewhere on GitHub). It would indeed be very nice, not just for exporters, but even maybe to implement new tools.

From my little tests I think the easiest would be to do it in js, and make all the core objects (layers, camera, etc) internally support being wrapped into js objects.

[pegvin]

Look into https://github.com/svaarala/duktape, it's pretty good and small too, tho lua was more "easy" which i implemented but will add duktape in near future too.

[guillaumechereau]

There is already a 'ducktape' branch in GitHub that I did a long time ago to add scripting support. One issue was that it was too slow in my opinion. Goxel also used to have Lua scripting support a while ago. Since I didn't see much use for it I removed it, as I don't want to bloat the program with things that nobody uses. I think I also had a look at quickjs, though the code is not online.

[pegvin]

Interesting, re-implement lua again then, it's simple and "fast"

[hendursaga]

I for one would like to see a Lua scripting API. Then I could use Fennel!

[guillaumechereau]

I am wondering what would the be pro and con of lua vs javascript as a plugin language. I feel like javascript is generally a better language, but lua is used a lot in video games.

[pegvin]

lua is easy to implement, easy to learn even aseprite (a very famous pixel art editor) uses lua for plugin system, lite-xl is a text editor completely made in lua with some awesome plugins for it written in lua.

[guillaumechereau]

I started to work on javascript plugin support. In the last release (0.12.0) it is now possible to do some very basic scripts for goxel. I plan to add more bindings. I tried a bit to make it work with lua but in the end I found javascript easier to work with, since I am really not familiar with lua.