[Bf-gamedev] Lua

[Jason Wilkins]

+1 to "I've never understood the appeal of loosely-typed languages for
complicated projects like games"

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.

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.


On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Tom Edwards <contact at steamreview.org>wrote:

>  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>wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Jason Wilkins
>> <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>
>> > 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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