Hey all, I have used Kotlin a bit here and there, but never really stuck my nose into the DSL opportunities. I have an existing, small custom DSL (perhaps close to a simplified haskell), whose main purpose is to provide a tiny, restrictive language (~40 functions). Is it possible either syntactically, or at compile time, to place heavy restrictions on the allowable functionality within a kotlin DSL? Thus for example, could I prevent basic string manipulation, except through my own pre-defined string manipulation functions? (I suspect this is partially in contrast to typical kotlin/DSL goals, but lack the experience.) Any tips/pointers to related work greatly appreciated. My googling so far has not led to any results.

You probably can restrict some functions if run your DSL with custom ScriptDefinition from Kotlin Scripting

interesting as it discusses explicit white/black-listing support.

anyway, I believe kotlin scripting and JSR-223 are the only real ways to add some language restrictions

I was also going to look into both java/kotlin online compilation, and what degree of function/symbol whitelisting I could manually apply. But language support would be obviously far simpler 🙂

language support

What do you mean? You cannot just limit arbitrary Kotlin code in some DSL, it would break a lot of things, so scripting is much better way to do that instead

Perhaps a naive interpretation of the scripting support — that it provides an alternative form of the language which explicitly includes this functionality, thus “language support”.

dsl doesn’t limit the language or existing classpath

I know it does not by default. I was trying to understand whether such restrictions could be added/manufactured.

What kind thing? limit what can be called inside of custom DSL?

Yep, for example, could I prevent basic string manipulation, except through my own pre-defined string manipulation functions?

Yes, but what is use case of it as for general usage feature of the language?

quarantining sensitive data — restricted DSL can provide that nominally, kotlin based DSL is what I was examining to understand what’s possible

if you running not trusted code you should use scripting API and JVM JSR-223, this is exactly why it created

I’m gonna echo @gildor and say scripting will get you far but the advanced stuff you’re looking for might be covered by compiler plugins.

Yes, compiler plugin may be a solution, but it's definitely not a simple one

Just saw this response — I have the same sense, that compiler level gives me more. I will dig into the scripting soon though to get a better sense of what it does and doesn’t do.