Re: C++ religious war (was: llua Higher-level C API for Lua)

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 12:26 AM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
>  Another axis to view this on is "tools vs. langauge" [1].  I don't use an
> IDE [2] and thus, I'm free to pick any langauge I want, and not have the
> language forced on me because of the environment [5].

This is very true, and my Eclipse experience with C mirrors yours. I
mean, we're reasonably intelligent people and Eclipse just threw up
its hands with coping with Lua, and that's not a big project!

Basic-editor people also tend to like C because it's an easy language
to process by external tools - e.g. the non-stupid editors have ctags
support. The lack of namespaces becomes a strength, since symbols are
unique (modulo 'struct N'/N)

My favourite non-stupid editor is SciTE and I was most pleased when I
wrote a Lua extension for using ctags.

To return to the Lua experience,  dynamic languages remain hard to
tool adequately so IDE support is still poor.  But a non-stupid editor
and a static analysis tool gets you a long way.

As for fast compiler/fast executable.  Again, LuaJIT shows that this
isn't necessarily true; it can can be up on its feet (while Python is
still trying to find its socks) and biting the heels of C in
milliseconds.  However, it is a temperamental race horse and not a
magic pixie dust solution; it's best at very straightforward code, and
beyond that you need to know your beast.