story
>I'd argue it's not a silver bullet as a primary language to write an entire game / engine in w/ more discussion continuing along those lines; there seems to be flexibility gained and lost. As a scripting engine that's one thing, but not a catch all for everything.
I write a lot of the core "engine" in C++ for speed and lack of garbage creation. The game I've got on the Android market right now has about 3149 lines of C++ code specific to the game (not counting 7400 lines of auto-generated Lua bindings), but 10k lines of Lua code. Most of the game code is in Lua; is that scripting?
The engine itself has about 10k lines of C++ code, and very little Lua. I want the engine to be as fast as possible, so it's hard for me to imagine doing it in a language that isn't C or C++.
>>>putting up native dialogs, etc. that will be non-native everywhere. >Why would you do this if you are creating an OpenGL/ES cross-platform game? Use a GL based GUI that will be cross-platform!
Geting UI right is really, really hard. For the primary game UI, and dialogs with buttons, sure, all of it happens in GL.
But if I want a list dialog, or a grid view, or a WebKit view, I'm not going to want to do my own halfway implementation -- I'm going to want a dialog with a native feel. There's no game anywhere that I've used that really gets anything as simple as a keyboard entry field completely right, if it doesn't use the native UI; there are some things better left to the UI experts.
A good friend of mine is a big Scala fan, but I haven't really explored it as an option.
The thing that kills Scala for me (without knowing anything else about it) is that most platforms I write for don't already have a guaranteed JVM -- iPhone and Windows being big ones. I mean, sure you almost always have SOME JVM on Windows, but I'd likely want to be shipping a specific JVM.
And that means adding multiple megabytes onto my package size. You've got 20Mb on iPhone if you want to be able to download over the air. Adding 5Mb to support a language...isn't an option.
LuaJIT takes up about 50k. With all its libraries. And performs on par with Scala. Which is a huge win for me. How much overhead does Scala add to an app on Android? I bet it's more than that, even with the guaranteed JVM (well, DVM) preinstalled.
