Use ifvms without Glkote-term

[victorcrimea]

I want to use ifvms.js as VM library to create a chatbot. And for that I need some way to pass user input to zvm. Previous versions (probably before adding compatibility with glkote-term) had a bootstrap.js with example how to work with vm programmatically, passing strings to the VM and getting the output.
Now ifvms seems to have tight integration with Glkote-term and I unable to get it working with string input.
So the question is: Are there any options to reduce library functionality to be able to do so?

[curiousdannii]

Depends on what you're doing and how. See interpfister/voice-z-machine for an example of running ZVM as a subprocess. If you don't want to handle all of Glk, that's probably a good solution. But Glk is a hard dependency on ifvms now.

[erkyrath]

It is possible (though not trivial) to replace the glkote.js part of the stack. This receives "display updates" from the VM and updates the browser display; you could change that to receiving updates and flinging them into the chatbot network interface.

(The glkote.js API is very simple, but the display update object is pretty complicated.)

[curiousdannii]

Yes that's another possibility. A simple glkote implementation may not be hard to produce. This one is 270 lines, and most of that is to handle terminal keyboard input -- the input mechanism for a chatbot would presumably have fewer nasty edge cases to deal with (no real character input for example), and so could be shorter.