We want to add scripting to a project.
We are hesitating which script engine to use. I have used in the past V8 and it's quite impressive. I have used Mono as well but in toy-projects or prototypes only.
The constraints are :
Which engine fits the best ?
(Are there any tutorial for compiling Mono under win64 with Visual Studio? Is there some packages that include Lib files and DLLs ?)
On
V8. It actually is a scripting engine rather than a full programming environment like Mono (which rivals Java for size).
However... if you want a scripting language, you might also want to have a look at Lua. It's famously easy to embed, really fast, really small, pretty easy to program for, and has a very liberal license. If speed's important there's LuaJIT, which is still under development but with care will handily beat C for numerical programming.
On
Since there are no upvoted answers, I'm going to mention ChaiScript (Yes, I'm a co-creator of the project). It's a header only scripting engine designed solely for embedding in C++ applications. It has full 64bit support and works with MSVC, G++ and MinGW. The only external dependency is boost.
Where it does not win is speed. If you need to do a lot of calculation in the script itself, well, I argue that you are using scripting wrong. The higher level the function you can expose to the scripting engine, the better.
There is an MSVS solution file included into Mono distribution, it is enough for building a library (but you won't be able to build .DLLs, better pick them from a binary distribution). See
mkbundlefor a way to embed .NET DLLs into a single binary. As for scripting itself, you can either embed Mono C# compiler (it is not that big, and it is easy to integrate) or use any of the numerous scripting languages that target .NET - e.g., IronPython.