<div dir="ltr">+1 to "I've never understood the appeal of loosely-typed languages for complicated projects like games"<div><br></div><div>While I really like Lua, I mainly think of it as just glue. In my opinion the typesafe heavy lifting should all be written in C++ and the scripting language should only be used as a sophisticated configuration file.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Of course, an add-on is different, it needs to do more than just coordinate pre-existing functionality, it needs to add functionality (by definition). C# would be excellent for that as the add-on gets more complicated and real software engineering starts to be needed.</div>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Tom Edwards <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:contact@steamreview.org" target="_blank">contact@steamreview.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
Mono/CLR is the right choice for game development. It's a
memory-managed environment which performs better than scripts, can
be strongly-typed or loosely-typed depending on language chosen, and
has a cross-platform IDE plus debugger ready to go (on Windows you
can use Visual Studio!).<br>
<br>
It's easy to use CLR or native libraries; compiling your own CLR
code is really fast; the runtime provides tonnes of useful built-in
classes; it has the concept of code security and sandboxing running
all the way through; and any transition would be smoothed
considerably by IronPython.<br>
<br>
Coming at this from the other angle, I've never understood the
appeal of loosely-typed languages for complicated projects like
games. They are nice for small, simple tasks but become a nightmare
to work with as a codebase grows. I maintain a Blender add-on with
nearly 200KB of code and my life would be much improved if I could
use C# instead of Python.<div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<div>On 26/09/2013 4:49, Jason Wilkins
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">I can understand your frustration Campbell. I've
never participated in any of those previous discussions, but
this is something that has been kicking around in the back of my
mind for a while, and seeing that we have a Blender gamedev list
reminded me of it yet again. It could just be that having one
language is good enough for 90% of people and going from 1 to 2
is a big enough step that nobody really wants to take it for the
10% that really care.
<div>
<br>
</div>
<div>In computer science if you have 2 of something you should
support an infinity of it ;-)
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<div>If I really really want to use Lua then I'll get it done.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I'll have to think about the LLVM or Mono suggestion. LLVM
especially is something I need to learn more about for reasons
outside of Blender, so I'd have a good reason to look into
that.</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:40 AM,
Campbell Barton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ideasman42@gmail.com" target="_blank">ideasman42@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Jason
Wilkins<br>
<<a href="mailto:jason.a.wilkins@gmail.com" target="_blank">jason.a.wilkins@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
> I've used SWIG, and it did occur to me that if I
wrote a SWIG interface file<br>
> that it would bring in lots of languages all at once.<br>
><br>
> It doesn't support just "any" language. I wish it
had V8 or spidermonkey<br>
> support, for example.<br>
><br>
><br>
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Jacob Merrill <<a href="mailto:blueprintrandom1@gmail.com" target="_blank">blueprintrandom1@gmail.com</a>><br>
> wrote:<br>
>><br>
>> What about this? - <a href="http://www.swig.org/" target="_blank">http://www.swig.org/</a><br>
>><br>
>> this seems like a way to make "ANY" language grab
the same handles in the<br>
>> BGE.<br>
>><br>
>> I could be mistaken...<br>
<br>
</div>
If we have more languages I would want to check on runtimes
that<br>
already support a verity of languages.<br>
- LLVM/JVM/Mono for eg... who knows, maybe PyPy or Parrot...<br>
<br>
(in all seriousness Mono seems most compelling and has
worked well for<br>
Unity3D), then we can support one runtime as well as
different<br>
languages.<br>
<br>
LLVM has the advantage we already bundle it with OSL, so
worth<br>
investigating too.<br>
<br>
But to get back to reality - this conversation keeps
re-opening and<br>
nothing ever comes of it.<br>
Yes - we can support whatever languages we like - but this
just ends<br>
up being a huge project when you consider integration with
the rest of<br>
Blender and ongoing maintenance.<br>
<span><font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
- Campbell<br>
</font></span>
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