From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-05-19T04:37:19+09:00
Subject: Re: thread-safe ANSI-C ruby needed to replace lua

Bira wrote:
> On 5/17/07, Jeremy Henty <onepoint@starurchin.org> wrote:
>> I'm surprised to hear this, can you say more?  I looked at Lua
>> recently and I was very impressed: a clean, simple language, proper
>> lexical closure and garbage collection, and the metatables feature is
>> very powerful.  What's wrong with Lua that the game software industry
>> needs something better?
>
> I think it's a matter of custom. Maybe the original poster is more
> used to Ruby than to Lua, and so the "Ruby way" feels more natural and
> efficient to him. It's the same reason people who are more used to
> Java, for example, complain about certain "missing features" of Ruby.
>
> I recently joined a Lua mailing list, and it seems to me that
> modifying the interpreter itself to fit your project's needs better is
> an accepted practice over there. Not something developers are expected
> to do every time, but not completely contrary to the language's design
> philosophy.
>
> I still don't have much experience with Lua, but it's something I want
> to look into in the future. So everything I said here can be, and
> probably is, wrong :).
>
Well ... I don't know anything about Lua, but if you really need 
ultimate compactness and performance and "bare-metal" access, I really 
think your choices are C or Forth, and Forth is much better at building 
"domain-specific languages" than C. :)