On 2010-02-07, Schala Zeal <schalaalexiazeal / gmail.com> wrote: > See, game developers tell me Lua is the way to go for performance and > flexibility, but the C embedding API feels so low-level that it's > intimidating. It is intentionally low-level, but really, it's not bad. > The bottom line is would there be any negative impact if I were to embed > a Ruby 1.9.1 scripting engine in my game, in contrast to Lua? The obvious thing, I think, would be the size and complexity. Lua's a really beautiful simple language for the kind of thing it's trying to do. Lua is very well suited to being the scripting engine for a game; it's a simple language with a small set of features (the entire LANGUAGE is probably smaller than some regex implementations!) that are easy to get used to. Ruby's a lot larger and more powerful... But frankly, a game scripting engine doesn't NEED to be exceptionally powerful, it just needs well-chosen primitives. Background: I have written a couple of WoW addons in Lua, I've also done various scripting for a couple of other games which used Lua. It really is a very good fit for the problem space. I love Ruby, but I wouldn't try to embed it in stuff; I'd write things in it, though. -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam / seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!