Comment by noodletheworld
1 year ago
I've worked with moai (1) reasonably extensively, and the lua in it is not easy to use and sucks.
Specifically, a project that is composed entirely of lua with no other dependencies is indeed very easy to build and maintain. I agree.
However, my $0.02 would be that if you plan to have a large project with many 3rd party dependencies, then cmake, visual studio, C++, lua and the time spent jumping between them and maintaining those dependencies in a custom build toolchain will cost you more time and effort than the benefits that lua offers (2).
...and you do, indeed, need to do that, because c++ lacks a centralized package ecosystem and unified build tooling; and as operating systems change, existing builds stop working.
So, yes, you may consider my answer to be 'rust'; but the actual answer is 'not C++ and not cmake'.
That all said, lua is a more mature better system than this is currently, with good resources online and an active community. In cases where a small dependency tree can be maintained, it's still the best choice I'm aware of.
I'm simply pointing out that there are reasons you would pick it over lua, and I think they're quite compelling for cases where the future dependency graph of your project is unknown / unknown.
[1] - https://github.com/moai/moai-dev
[2] - ...and yes, I'm aware that moai is especially egregious in this regard. I get it.
"Not C++ and not cmake" is right on the money. Also Rhai seems to be in its infancy. Despite its current limitations, there's an argument for supporting it early to see where this road will take us. Hopefully to a relatively fast and more feature rich scripting language and engine that fit snuggly into Rust projects, which would be fantastic.
Also played around with moai back in the days when Doublefine had their Kickstarter and choose it as the base framework. But I found it hard to make the jump between c++ and lua etc. The docs made the decision when to write what simple. Everything lua until it becomes a bottleneck. But when to start from nothing this decision is still hard. Pull a lib and expose it to Lua or try to write the lib in Lua? Stuff like that. I needed a basic triangulation algorithm for 2d shapes and implemented that myself from a paper about the ear clipping algorithm. Fun times. All hobby stuff just for fun and games.