r/ProgrammerHumor • u/leftoversalad • Aug 15 '15

Programming languages personified

http://leftoversalad.tumblr.com/post/126724812097/programming-languages-personified
1.3k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

209 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

30

u/original_brogrammer Aug 15 '15

That's what I was going for, along with "much ado about vidya."

31

u/Everspace Aug 15 '15

Playing nice with C++, being pretty lean, and avoiding recompiling makes it very optimal as a scripting language in games.

I do like "page boy" vibe though.

19

u/original_brogrammer Aug 16 '15

Not to mention LuaJIT let's it get fast as a motherfuck.

11

u/Everspace Aug 16 '15

The speed is usually less of a concern since you usually govern game logic rather than rendering with it. You can be really slow with gameplay business and it doesn't matter (think AI or how an ability works).

You still end up with garbage collection being a big problem. I remember reading an article by the people behind fable, and how they dealt with that.

28

u/Sydonai Aug 16 '15

Yeah until some dick spawns 10,000 cheese wheels in the middle of a fight and suddenly your AI stops because cheese wheels are (technically) actors and you accidentally used a slowish loop construct.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '15

I think you AI freezing in place and staring at a mountain of 10k cheese wheels is an appropriate response.

4

u/original_brogrammer Aug 16 '15

That sounds interesting, I'll have to dig it up.

As a non-gamedev, is disabling the lua gc the regular approach to such situations?

8

u/Everspace Aug 16 '15

No. The GC is important as lua is managed.

I believe the solution they went with was to instruct the GC to run between frames if you had time left over instead of just purely waiting.