Re: Does Lua need a JIT?

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

On 22 February 2017 at 03:40, 云风 Cloud Wu <cloudwu@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk>于2017年2月22日周三 上午5:12写道：
>>
>> I am not a games programmer and do not know whether interpreted Lua is
>> good enough in this case.
>
>
> I have been a game programmer for 20 years, and use lua since 4.0 . I think
> lua is good enough for game project because it's easy to embed to game
> engine. We need a flexible dynamic language for  gameplay  and GUI , and the
> performance only exists in game engine, which is written by C or C++.   I
> remember that I have tried to embed lua, python, javascript to my game
> engine for my first MMORPG project in 2001. lua is the best choice, because
> its less memory overhead, and we can easily manipulate the memory usage (We
> should run the game client in 64M Ram).
>

Thanks for the insight!

>>
>> In my opinion, having worked on Ravi and in my usage of it, Lua is not
>> a general purpose language that you would use to build a large scale
>> application. This is not because of any deficiency in Lua, it is more
>> that large scale development is better done in statically typed
>> languages like Java, C#, Go, Swift etc. The cost of developing complex
>> applications in a dynamic language is just too high. I know that many
>> folks on this list will probably disagree with this view, but leaving
>> aside your love for Lua and your wish to use Lua everywhere, would you
>> still use Lua as a general purpose application development platform?
>
>
> We now use lua both in game client and server. For our game server, there
> are about 10K C loc (https://github.com/cloudwu/skynet) for the framework ,
> and more than 100K lua loc for gameplay.
>
> For mmo game server, Lua is still the best choice rather than go,erlang,
> python or nodejs because we choose the actor model for the game server
> framework like erlang. We can run thousands lua vm in one process that
> python can't (because of GIL). LuaJIT is not suitable too because of 2G
> memory limit. I think our framework (skynet) has better performance than
> nodejs even nodejs use v8 JIT, because skynet can use all the cpu cores. I
> have tried luaJIT for my framework , only 10%~15% performance improvements.
>
> And coroutine in lua can be a better solution for asynchronous programming
> than callback model in nodejs.

Looks like Go might be an option for you as it is designed for this use case?


Regards
Dibyendu