The current defacto-standard of embedded scripting is Lua. Lua is a great, simple language that serves its purpose well. However, it is written in pure ANSI C. While this gives it outstanding portability, it greatly limits its ability to interact well with C++.

ChaiScript, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up with integration with C++ in mind.

To effectively use Lua, a language designed for embedding, with C++, you must use a preprocessor or meta compiler such as toLua++ or SWIG. While these tools are helpful, they do add unnecessary complexity to your application when you did not specifically need Lua and instead were searching for a simple way to provide scripting capabilities to your application.

Similarly, boost::python, while avoiding the meta-compiler, adds the complexity and size of libpython and python module system.

ChaiScript has no meta-compiler, no library dependencies, no build system requirements and no legacy baggage of any kind. At can work seamlessly with any C++ functions you expose to it. It does not have to be told explicitly about any type, it is function centric.

With ChaiScript you can literally begin scripting your application by adding three lines of code to your program and not modifying your build steps at all.