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David Jeske wrote:


On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 09:23:31PM -0300, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:


What is your experience?



I'll summarize at the top and save people time. This isn't all
positive towards Lua, but it's all good information. Of course this is
all in my humble personal opinion.

Lua's biggest strengths are:

- ease of integration (the lua C api is simple and powerful)
- execution speed     (the lua VM is very fast)

The biggest troubles I've had using Lua are:
- using my add-in class machinery is very error prone because the syntax is all based on tables and functions. 

  (anyone have any good syntax for classes??)

- combination of add-in class machinery and weak typing makes
  my Lua code hard to understand and makes errors hard to
  report about and thus hard to track down.

I (obviously) wouldn't have either of those problems if I were using
Lua for some simple configuration and simple scripting like it's
sort-of intended.



Well I agree with all of that, though I would add a few more strengths
- it's a very flexible language. I've got some nice features in my component system that would be difficult in other languages, namely on-the-fly loading of components and the ability to use the same language for scripting and data files. That said, it would still be 
   nice to have a cleaner "class" structure.

 - it's small. For anyone considering a console game, a big win.
- it's portable. I'm running on Win32, Linux, BeOS, and soon MacOS. I haven't tried 
   this with Java, but from what I've heard it's a nightmare.
We're YAGCS (yet another game company startup) and Lua is an integral part of our engine architecture. Not just for scripting, but also for most of the game data. I haven't put it on The List as we're basically an unknown company working on an unknown product, and I always hate it when I see products trumpeting their success by referencing projects that may well never see the light of day. Flexibility, speed, and 
size -- in that order -- are what I like about Lua.
Do people around you know Lua?
People? What people? ;) No, but if I find some people I'll be sure to tell them all 
about it.


Jason
379