"Lua is a powerful, light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Coupled with it being relatively fast and having a very lenient license, it has gained a following among game developers for providing a viable scripting interface. It has been used in games such as World of Warcraft and Far Cry, and in applications such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Snort."
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Member since:2005-07-06
"Euphoria is a general purpose language whereas Lua is designed to supplement flexible applications with scripting capabilities--like in-game scripting."
This is a marketing difference, not a technical one. You can perfectly use lua as a general purpose language, but the fact that it's also well suited for inclusion into other applications is a significant advantage.
Anyway, lack of associative containers in a language meant for high level programming = FAIL (not to mention the lack of functional programming which is also a tremendously useful tool to write concise and nice code, especially for GUIs)
If you want speed, use a compiled language, or a jitted one if you want some compromise between language flexibility and speed (incidentally, there is a lua JIT interpreter)
Or a mix between a compiled language and an interpeted one - which is something at which lua is very good.
Your comments about speed are anecdotic at best.
Ps. If the euphoria guys read that, please, pretty please: make a monochrom version of your site. I think I burnt half of my retinal cones while browsing it.
Member since:
2006-08-18
What I meant is that the syntax share a lot in common.
Euphoria is a general purpose language whereas Lua is designed to supplement flexible applications with scripting capabilities--like in-game scripting.
As for performance... the speed different is huge in some cases. For example an old version of interpreted Euphoria performed a sieve benchmark ~18.5 times faster than Lua. Todays Euphoria has even faster execution speed than before, plus execution speed can be further enhanced up to 5x simply by using the automatic Euphoria to C translator--now also FOSS.