RE: [GD-General] JavaScript as a scripting language

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

Ignacio,

These are, in fact, the reasons I was looking at JavaScript.  From a
pragmatic standpoint, it has a syntax and methodology that's a lot more
approachable than Lua's for a lot of programmers (and even
non-programmers who may have experience from Web site development).  It
has GC (although, like you, I'm unclear on what kind of garbage
collection is prevalent -- it's up to each browser and/or engine to
select the form GC, but early versions were mark-and-sweep and I think
very early versions of Netscape were ref-counted).  It's trivial to
embed.    It's interpreted and quite fast (the njs benchmarks at the
GCLS are generally as fast, if not faster, than Lua's).  It also has a
reasonably clean interface to and from an application, although looking
at some of the docs for garbage collection, the active participation an
app must undergo in order to "root" an object seems kind of ugly.

I also like that it's dynamically typed and prototype based instead of
being class based.  I think this provides a lot of clean generality
since there's no artificial bifurcation between types and objects --
they're one and the same, and 'types' are now first class objects (which
I believe SmallTalk and Obj-C also supported).

So given all this, I'm confused as to why JavaScript isn't mentioned in
the same breath as Python and Lua and Ruby when it comes to game
scripting.  There are free implementations (SpiderMonkey), it's
portable, and it's already heavily used and well understood with a TON
of documentation available for it.

My only guess is that there's a stigma attached to it since some people
consider it (erroneously) a glorified form of HTML.  Of course, there's
also the obvious "it sucks because of [these reasons]", but I've never
actually seen someone do a post-mortem or at least a rationalization on
why njs/SpiderMonkey/JS are bad for game scripting.

All that said, I'm pretty down on game scripting in general, but I'll
leave that for another post.

Brian