Packaging

Your scripting language implementation should be distributed in a JAR file. The produced JAR should be self contained, meaning that all of the runtime classes should be bundled in it. It should not rely on manifest header like Class-Path and others. The build system will not take those into account when loading your classes.

Your package should contain a class file which is an implementation of ScriptAccessProvider. This class will be loaded first when the script language implementation is used.

Your archive may be multi-release, the build system will load the classes accordingly. However, module related information on JDK 9+ may not be taken into account.

The above is the bare minimum that you need to package in your archive, the language will be useable with the build system in this way. However, in order to do that, the user will need to specify the exact name of the class, as in the following command line argument example:

-script-files **/*.lang 
-script-classpath pwd://language.jar 
-script-class example.lang.LanguageAccessProvider

The above example sets an example language to be used for files with the extension .lang, and loaded from the language.jar that is in the current process working directory. The language provider will be the class with the name example.lang.LanguageAccessProvider.

Note that the -script-class option was necessary for the build system to locate the entry point for your language. In order to avoid this, you can declare the saker.build.scripting.ScriptAccessProvider service in your JAR, using the ServiceLoader facility of the Java runtime.
This way, the -script-class option may be omitted.