RE: Lua v4 vs. Lua v5

["Nick Trout" <nick@...>]

> My team has just released a console game that uses Lua v4 
> (with yield patch) for in-game scripting.  We are quite happy 
> with Lua!
> 
> We are now in pre-production for our next game, and we want 
> to expand on our use of Lua.  I've scanned the archives of 
> the mailing list and also the documentation on the Lua site, 
> but I'm having a hard time getting good information on the following:
> 
> 	- Lua v4 vs. Lua v5:  if we're not interested in 
> coroutines, is it worth upgrading to Lua v5?  We found v4 to 
> be quite stable, and we're a bit leery of moving to v5, given 
> that it's only been out for 2 months.

Lua5 is supposed to be faster (although I haven't tested this myself). A
list of the features are here:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaFiveFeatures

If you use tolua to do your binding then you're out of luck until tolua5
comes along. I suspect a lot of projects will be ported as soon as this
appears.

TBH, if you're only doing low level scripting in game I'd question the
merits of moving as in either case you're probably not using the
advanced feature set. The transition may involve a lot of binding
changes if you've done everything by hand. Lua5 does seem to be very
stable though. 

> 	- Integrating a debugger:  in our previous game, our 
> script writers had to use the venerable "shotgun printf's" 
> debugging technique.  :)  We would now like to investigate 
> the integration of a run-time Lua debugger into our game.  
> Are there any off-the-shelf solutions?  Do we have to roll 
> our own?  I don't have much experience with that, and I'm 
> wondering how onerous this task would be.  On April 24th, 
> 2003, Chris Jacob posted a similar question, but I don't 
> think he received any replies.

I/we've written a Lua debugger but I'm not sure I could open source it -
although I'm an open source fan. It's entirely written in Python to
debug Lua on PS2 ;-). I started trying to develop a debugger and IDE but
my circumstances changed and it's gone on hold. I would be interested in
continuing work on this at some point. It might be better to write the
Lua IDE and debugger in Lua using wxLua - it already has a limited
debugger and code to connect though TCP/IP to a Lua client - so you
could use that (Python has the massive advantage of Boa-constructor
though - although you can still use the XML dialog constructors with
wxLua I believe). When LuaCheia is released and wxLua becomes a library
of that I'm sure we'll see some advances.

http://lua-users.org/wiki/VisLua


> If you've read this far, thanks for your time!


Nick (also now Vancouver :-)