[q2x] Refactorization

Nick Trout nicktrout at shaw.ca
Sun Nov 9 18:32:05 EST 2003




>> could be refactored. From experience I don't know why you'd want to
> do this as Lua is incredibly flexible, efficient and more than
> adequate for the usage of this project.

>My biggest gripe, honestly, is that Lua doesn't have real-time GC and
it's not typesafe.  This can make larger scale projects a bit more
tricky than I'd like.

Lua should have incremental GC early next year, and the language authors
generally deliver good quality solutions. It's only a problem really if you
are generating lots of objects which need to be collected. Code can be
optimised to minimise this. I think Pythons GC is a hack and Python
generates a lot more objects in use than Lua. Although I love Python I don't
think its a realtime/game language. I can't find any reference to Ruby
having incremental GC, it has a mark and sweep GC, like Lua, so you'd have
all the same problems.

Python is dynamically typed as well as Lua, but I think Ruby is statically
typed. I've programmed a lot more Python than Lua and I've never missed
static typing. It doesn't affect scalability and its a less hassle. The only
time you really need typing is when you're dealing with binary formatting
and Python has libraries for that (e.g. struct and array).

Nick






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