[Flightgear-devel] Nasal alternatives : possible, of course, but trivial or hair pulling task ?

[Nicolas Q. <nqu...@gm...>]

Hi all, let me start that my goal here is NOT to start a polemic on the
reasons for using nasal vs any other scripting language, or the scripting vs
native code, or any such argument :)
Thanks for remembering that.
That said, being a long time user and proponent of levering scripting in
games/sims, and particularly, using Lua, I have a keen interest in any
insights garnered over time by current and past fgfs devs.
How coupled are Nasal and the scripting glue in FGFS ? Is there a clean
break, or if not, can it be refactored without too much pain into something
that would allow end dev users to use whatever scripting language they
prefer, or have many modules already writen in, etc.

If the coupling is not of the hair pulling type, it might be conceivable to
integrate another scripting language alongside Nasal for starters, and in
time, completely replace it if one is so inclined :)

For me, this would be Lua, and I'll be working on integrating it in my local
fork, but as I'm just getting down to tinker with FGFS source code, I'm
interested in hearing your views on the topic. If there is interest in this
beyond my own, I'd rather do it in a collaborative/friendly way that's not
one sided, or in other words, I'd rather not rip out Nasal savagely to
replace it completely with Lua, without thinking about compatibility down
the road.
My preferred approach would be to start with cohabitation, rather than
coupling Lua to a local fork...

What I'm interested in hearing is about the collective and individual
experience of working with Nasal at the source code level, the
API/communication mechanism between its VM/interpreter and "native" code,
and plenty of other documentation details which do not seem to exist or that
I haven't been able to find, and can save a lot of time in coming to grasp
with code you haven't written.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences with Nasal integration,
Cheers,
Nic

-- 
Be Kind.
Remember, everyone is fighting a hard battle.