Re: [GD-General] Scripting Systems

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

> Yes indeed.  The JavaScript 2.0 spec apparently adds optional
> static type checking.  I think JavaScript has somewhat more
> practical syntax and class semantics, compared to Lua, as well.
> I've never tried to embed a JavaScript interpreter though.

JavaScript gets a bit of a bad rap, mostly because it's associated 
with, say, mouse rollovers.

There was a discussion about this on the vworld-tech mailing list, and 
basically one of the big things, IMO, that's holding back mass 
adoption of SpiderMonkey is that people just have no idea if it's fast 
or not.

As much as the GLCS is a pile of poo, it's all a lot of people have to 
go on when it comes to real world performance measurement.  When I saw 
Ruby routinely being outperformed by a factor of 5 to 10 or more, I 
knew that it probably wasn't going to be practical for my use.

Since the NJS implementation scored poorly, that was the only 
datapoint I had to go by for SpiderMonkey even though it's an 
unrelated codebase.  I was taken to task for this assumption 
(rightfully so), but at the same time that's effectively asking me to 
try out every language and see for myself if it's going to be 
effective or not, and I don't have that kind of time.  There are 
probably 20 or so small languages that are interesting in some fashion 
or another (Small, IO, etc.) but which I don't have the time to really 
sit down and exhaustively give a "fair" assessment.

So I put the onus on the implementors if they want people to adopt 
their stuff.

And in situations like that, I pretty much fall back to Lua =3D)

Brian