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2406 :: How crazy of an idea is it to turn nim into a sandboxed "scripting" language with macros?

• ryeguy (orginal) [2016-07-25T02:28:53+02:00] view original

  If I wanted to use nim as a modding language for my game, would it be possible to get full safety by using term rewriting macros to rewrite dangerous operations (eg file system access, network access)?

  Mods could be distributed as source and the game would ship with the nim compiler. When booting, it would compile the mods into a single dll. When compiling, it would inject term rewriting macros into the source which could be used to capture some operations (eg, force file i/o to only happen in a mod specific folder) or disable some completely (eg interop with C).

  I only have a passing knowledge of nim, is this a reasonable approach or is there some big flaw in it? If the sandbox were implemented this way, would it be fallible?

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• Krux02 (orginal) [2016-07-25T12:29:50+02:00] view original

  I think it is completely possible, the question is just, how easy the approach is. There is nim in interpreted mode, which is run for macros at compile time. The problem is, that this version of nim can not call to C for reason unknown to me at the moment. Might be security, but it is just a raw guess. But for the worst case, you can always compile to javascript, and just run that, because javascript already has a sandbox developed for it.

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• OderWat (orginal) [2016-07-25T12:38:29+02:00] view original

  Well... Writing for Linux or OS X you could use a real os sandbox and just let them do what they want. I don't know if anything besides a VM is available for windows.

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