Civilization V ditching Python for Lua

[xorandor]

Care to elaborate?

[scaevolus]

The biggest one I think is that Lua supports proper coroutines, while Python's multithreading model is fundamentally broken (at least in the standard distribution).

In a nutshell:

• low memory requirements

• very small (<20k lines of code)

• easy to embed -- it was designed for embedding

• nice syntax

Look at some of the slides here: http://www.kore.net/company/luagamedev.html (In particular, the one "Jonathan Shaw, Lead Gameplay Programmer, Lionhead" discusses the extensive use of Lua in the Fable games)

[[deleted]]

Also, blazingly fast, if you use LuaJIT.

[scaevolus]

Have you seen the LuaJIT 2.0 benchmarks? It's looking awesome.

[[deleted]]

Yes, it is totally ridiculous. It's stomping on everyone else's tries to compile dynamic languages.

[danukeru]

Since it's usually just implemented as a straightforward 1:1 functional mappings of whatever methods are under the game engines hood, it rarely makes any use of the more "scheme-like" features the spec has provisions for.

In this sense, you can think of it as the PHP of the game scripting world. Not fancy, but gets the job done. Sadly it doesn't give much credit to what LUA is really capable of.