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Comment by cageface

14 years ago

I am a big Ruby fan but I don't really see how this is enough of an improvement over Lua to pose a serious threat.

Depends on the audience. There are probably lots of people who know Ruby and would like to be able to use it where they currently can't. It might not be likely to win the hearts of the C++ game engine hackers, but that might not necessarily be the goal.

I thought the hivemind was that Lua was bloody awful?

Disclaimer: I have never even read some Lua, honest question

  • It's not elegant but it's incredibly compact and isolated. I embedded it as a language in an iPhone game (as have many others). Making it bridge with Objective-C was fairly straight-forward and the memory/speed footprint was acceptable for a mobile device.

  • I've only dabbled a bit in Lua but I mostly read very positive things about it and there are tons of success stories of embedded Lua out there. Way more than any other embedded scripting language. Unlike Ruby or Python etc Lua was designed from the ground up for this.

  • As others have said, it is small, fast and flexible with a very permissive licence so it is the scripting language of choice for embedded and gaming applications.