On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 13:59:05 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

+1

I heard some nice things about chibi on the interwebs.
Not used it, tho.

:-)

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 08:38:02 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:

Squirrel comes to mind. It’s similar to Lua but has a C-like syntax and some extra types and features. It’s very lightweight; D bindings can be written in half an hour, and the entire C++ code base is just 7k lines of code. Used in some games by Valve.

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 09:43:03 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:

As a Wren user: it works and is OK, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend Wren that much not for these reasons, but because it's not that easy to interface with and imports are annoying, also it's basically abandoned. The syntax is a polar opposite to D. We've modified the interpreter for our needs but surely there must be better alternatives, such as... regular Lua. I would have choosen something else now.

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 09:43:03 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:

Probably not that hard to add support though, if you can live with weak typing (casts from float to int will only be detected at runtime).

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 15:04:40 UTC, Ogi wrote:

Which has GC (reference counting/tracing hybrid) and yet it is used in video games. If D can improve the GC implementation it will be suitable for games as well.

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 18:18:21 UTC, matheus wrote:

Is the run_the_game() part of code supposed to be annotated with the @nogc attribute?

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 09:55:18 UTC, Hors wrote:

I had this issue with Lua 5.1. It "works" for medium-ish integers, but as soon as you're encoding data in ints, such as unique IDs made up of multiple components that may have high bits set, it'll fall apart. I am still using Lua 5.1, but now I just.. don't do that anymore. Unfortunately if you want to pass along data that would otherwise be a 64-bit int, you either have to send along a raw pointer or else create a Lua-GC-allocated object to hold it instead (and at that point you may as well just use userdata for the D object itself).

While not recommending it as such, I believe Julia supports multiple int types, though my cursory examination suggested the performance and resource draw is far, far worse than Lua.

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 08:38:02 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:

What problems did you have with Lua 5.4? Building it, linking it, driving it from D, Lua as a language? It's very tough competition. I got to 'hello world' pretty quickly with bindbc-lua,

#! /usr/bin/env dub
/++ dub.sdl:
    dependency "bindbc-lua" version="~>0.6.0"
    versions "LUA_54"
    libs "lua-5.4"
+/
import bindbc.lua;
import std.stdio : writeln;

void main() {
    LuaSupport ret = loadLua();
    assert(ret != luaSupport.noLibrary, "Lua shared library failed to load");
    assert(ret != luaSupport.badLibrary, "One or more symbols failed to load. Bad version?");
    assert(ret == luaSupport);

    auto L = luaL_newstate();
    assert(L, "failed to open Lua");
    luaL_openlibs(L);
    luaL_loadstring(L, "print 'hello world'");
    lua_call(L, 0, 0);
    lua_close(L);
}

and Lua 5.4 has integers:

$ lua -e 'print(_VERSION, 9223372036854775807)'
Lua 5.4 9223372036854775807

vs.

$ luajit -e 'print(_VERSION, 9223372036854775807)'
Lua 5.1 9.2233720368548e+18

On Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 11:03:55 UTC, Hipreme wrote:

AngelScript was a user-exposed scripting language in Star Ruler and its sequel, cross-platform space 4x games. It seemed pretty reasonable there, and supposedly adds <2MB to a build. It's also a much more normal language than Lua if the language was the problem.