yeswalrus wrote:Just a thought since I'm a fan of the language - LuaJIT seems like a fantastic option in terms of speed - one other option you might consider though is D. It's a compiled language, though the garbage collection might be a deal breaker, I do recall seeing a talk on youtube about a game studio that successfully used it as a scripting language by having their engine hot swap compiled .dlls
It's funny you mention that -- at the beginning of the week I did some preliminary exploration into D, and have decided that it warrants further consideration. I will probably look over it more carefully next week and see if it seems like something worth pursuing.
What would be fantastic about it is that it could be used as a scripting language -- as you said -- as well as the engine language (I don't mean replacing the C library, but the stuff that sits between super-performance-intensive and not-performance-intensive would be a great candidate).
If I understand correctly, you have full control over the GC, and can turn it off and manage memory manually. I'm also impressed by the metaprogramming facilities. Seems like I might be able to write code with similar performance to C++ but far fewer lines if I can get fluent with the metaprogramming. And about hot-swapping .dlls -- I also really like that the compiler is clean and self-contained such that it could potentially be shipped with the game (I think?) and mods could actually be partially 'compiled' into the game, leaving no perf gap.
The coming days will give me a much better idea of how LuaJIT will hold up, but it's nice that I still have quite a few options even if LJ doesn't end up being the solution.