# ODEN: A small TypeScript coding environment

This is just a silly little project which connects a JS interpreter with WebGL and init/update/draw loop in Rust.
You can think about this maybe like Pico-8 except not constrained, or LÖVE but with JS instead of lua.

## Why?

1. I want types and type hints and type checking for my little scripts, they're useful.
   Lua doesn't have an equivalent of what TypeScript has, except maybe LUAU but that's incompatible with LÖVE, so what would the point be?

2. I want WebGL because I would like to be able to (easily) run things in multiple places.
   I like that you can play Pico-8 games on the web.
   Seems like it would be nice to make that work too.

## Why not?

1. No operator overloading in TypeScript.
   I'm going to get irritated by this quickly I think.
   QuickJS actually supports operator overloading but TypeScript doesn't and patching operator overloading into the type-checker looks very difficult.

## Details

### JavaScript

I'm using QuickJS, lightly patched, with my own bindings.

#### QuickJS

The easy alternative to QuickJS is to use Deno Core, which binds V8. 
Unfortunately, Deno Core has kind of a wild architecture, where it goes through flatbuf for all its communications, and keeps the JavaScript engine at arm's length. 
It doesn't expose things like "make a new native class."
And while it feels "possible" to use (see https://deno.com/blog/roll-your-own-javascript-runtime-pt2), it was not quite as easy to use for what I wanted to do as you might like.

QuickJS may be more or less abandoned by Fabrice Bellard, but also it does what I need it to.

(But it makes me sad: there are millions of dollars and uncountable engineering-hours in V8.
V8 is one of the best dynamic language runtimes ever constructed by man.
It would be really nice to be able to take advantage of it.)

#### Lightly Patched

See above about being abandoned: we have small patches in place to e.g. expose information about modules and whatnot.

#### My Own Bindings

The other bindings are maddeningly incomplete, and don't expose features I want to expose out of QuickJS.