Re: Scripting

[Jorrit Tyberghein <Jorrit.Tyberghein@uz.kuleuven.ac.be>]

Steve Baker wrote:

> That can happen in any language that's sufficiently powerful to do the
> things most games need to do. Unless you are prepared to go without
> pointers, you are going to see these kinds of issues.

I object to that. Language like Java and Python manage to avoid these
pointer issues while still remaining sufficiently powerful (Java is used
for large commercial applications even). So pointers are not an essential
language feature at all.

> You might have better performance for different interpreted languages,
> but it's never going to be better than maybe 10x slower...just think
> about the minimum set of machine-code instructions it takes to execute
> one byte-code instruction.

I also don't agree with this completely... With Java there is now technology
that does compilation at runtime (JIT and HotSpot technologies). This allows
'interpreted' languages to become FASTER than C++ in theory (see the
word 'in theory') because at run time you have information about the program
that at compile time simply isn't present. For example, HotSpot optimizes
code at run time if it sees that code is used a lot. There is still a lot of research
going on in these areas but in theory the potential is there so that interpreted
languages could (in future) run faster than compiled languages just because
a compiler doesn't have sufficient information to optimize without the
program running.

> So taking the advice of someone who'se never written a game over someone
> who has written lots of them would be a good idea?

Someone who hasn't written a game yet can still have better ideas compared
to someone who has done nothing else his entire life... Experience has nothing
to do with having good ideas :-)

Greetings,


--
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Jorrit.Tyberghein@uz.kuleuven.ac.be, University Hospitals KU Leuven BELGIUM

The labyrinth of Ephebe is ancient and full of one hundred and one amazing
things you can do with hidden springs, razor-sharp knives, and falling
rocks.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
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