[Bf-gamedev] Lua

[Tom Edwards]

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!).

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.

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.

On 26/09/2013 4:49, Jason Wilkins wrote:
> 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.
>
> In computer science if you have 2 of something you should support an 
> infinity of it ;-)
>
> If I really really want to use Lua then I'll get it done.
>
> 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.
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Campbell Barton 
> <ideasman42 at gmail.com <mailto:ideasman42 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Jason Wilkins
>     <jason.a.wilkins at gmail.com <mailto:jason.a.wilkins at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > I've used SWIG, and it did occur to me that if I wrote a SWIG
>     interface file
>     > that it would bring in lots of languages all at once.
>     >
>     > It doesn't support just "any" language.  I wish it had V8 or
>     spidermonkey
>     > support, for example.
>     >
>     >
>     > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Jacob Merrill
>     <blueprintrandom1 at gmail.com <mailto:blueprintrandom1 at gmail.com>>
>     > wrote:
>     >>
>     >> What about this? - http://www.swig.org/
>     >>
>     >> this seems like a way to make "ANY" language grab the same
>     handles in the
>     >> BGE.
>     >>
>     >> I could be mistaken...
>
>     If we have more languages I would want to check on runtimes that
>     already support a verity of languages.
>     - LLVM/JVM/Mono for eg... who knows, maybe PyPy or Parrot...
>
>     (in all seriousness Mono seems most compelling and has worked well for
>     Unity3D), then we can support one runtime as well as different
>     languages.
>
>     LLVM has the advantage we already bundle it with OSL, so worth
>     investigating too.
>
>     But to get back to reality - this conversation keeps re-opening and
>     nothing ever comes of it.
>     Yes - we can support whatever languages we like - but this just ends
>     up being a huge project when you consider integration with the rest of
>     Blender and ongoing maintenance.
>
>     --
>     - Campbell
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>
>
>
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