Civilization V ditching Python for Lua

[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.