Re[2]: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

[Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>]

Hello Luiz,

>> The PopCap Games guys put up a postmortem on their newest game, Bookworm 
>> Adventures.  It has many references to how they used Lua, modified it to 
>> accomplish their needs, and the technology they built around Lua.
>> 
>> http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/2_2/index.php?id=2

LHdF> "We heavily modified the Lua interpreter to support many advanced
LHdF> features. The first thing we did was to change the syntax to be almost
LHdF> identical to C/C++ since the BASIC-like coding style was irksome, and to
LHdF> add in sorely missed operators such as +=, *=, ++, etc. "

LHdF> If they wanted Javascript they knew where to find it, right? :-(

I agree, if progammers are really concerned about this syntax differences
then they aren't very experienced.

LHdF> "Furthermore, we made a series of incredible performance enhancements to
LHdF> the execution speed and memory management of the interpreter. We greatly
LHdF> decreased table access times and improved the performance of the garbage
LHdF> collector."

LHdF> Now, it would be interesting to know details about this.

I must say i think the same same. I like the programming model but it
is very slow and i really don't know why the design of lua wants to
use slow hashtable access anywhere. My performance tests show that for
function calls there is a lot (i really mean a lot) room for
optimization.

And sorry i never understood why simplicity is a positive value in a
language implementation. A clean simple API is but internal
implementation is _NOT_. Thats a very academic point of view.

I'm now using lua because there is nothing else with this memory
footprint, but i have to say i'm not as impressed as i was after
reading the first tutorial.

And by the way, please offer real arrays and a builtin performance
optimized object system soon.

-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's