Support for other programming languages

[hdoupe]

As the Python version of ParamTools is becoming more and more feature complete, I've started thinking about adding support for using ParamTools in the browser and with low-level programming languages like C and Fortran. Through my work on Compute Studio, I've already starting writing pieces of ParamTools in TypeScript, and it should be easy to write a more complete implementation from here. If anyone is interested in following along, I'm developing ParamTools.js on the paramtools-js branch. This could be a good opportunity for anyone who is interested in learning more about JavaScript/TypeScript since much of the hard work is done and it will mostly be a translation exercise. Once that is ready, it will be easy to build GUI's that make it more pleasant to write and edit ParamTools configuration files.

Writing a lower-level version of ParamTools will not be as easy and probably will not come around until someone asks for it. When/if this day comes, Rust seems like a great language to use for this due to its safety guarantees, well-documented FFI, and the powerful serde serialization/deserialization libary that is written with Rust.