I'm surprised no-one has mentioned C#. The great thing about C# is that the .net framework gives you an interface to the C# compiler, so it's a simple matter to compile C# source files on the fly. C# is useful as a scripting language because it's faster than Java but much more easy to use than C or C++.

And why not? I've heard it's very good at what it does.
EDIT: Wow, this thread is getting long, and interesting. I'm probably going to make a 2D game engine when I'm done with all of my other projects and want to have a scripting language in it, but I don't know whether to go with javascript (which I already know) or lua (which I don't know, but looks easy to learn, and is smaller). I guess I'll have to try both.

Ok, let's see... I got spidermonkey working and integrated into an extremely simple C++ wrapper so I could integrate it into one of my games to experiment with.

Speedwise, I loaded a script (var i=6000,n=0; while(--i>=0)n+=i; print(n);), compiled it, ran it every game 'step' (60"f"ps), and it had no impact on speed, going up to 7000 started to affect the framerate, but there will be very little looping in-script for my engine, so I'm not concerned about speed.

Obviously speed-critical components will be written in C++ no matter what language I'm using, so it's all rather academic. I'm not gonna write a ray tracer in it.

Guile, Io, both are syntaxes I'm not familiar with, so there's no real point in going with those over python for example.

c-smile looks pretty cool, considering it's java and javascript. I'll have to check that one out. From the site and downloads (haven't grabbed it yet), it's not clear if it's intended to be embedded or standalone. Plus there's no mac port, but I'm guessing that's not uber difficult considering what it is. (Not to mention another 'new' syntax, although it looks identical to javascript with better in-script class support.)

As for C#, allow me to say, no. If I were to go that far, I'd use java. But both are overkill. Plus C# sucks by definition.

you have no idea, but you think it's best to bash it first? Have you considered to STFU if you don't know what you're talking about?

You have no idea what you're talking about, do you? Please enlighten us... what is that cruel origin?

You realize that I just reversed your statement ("But why use Javascript if you can use Lua")? Of course you do.
And I totally agree.

Browse to the spidermonkey website and read.

See above.
But mainly you provide a callback dealing with get / set requests for the different attributes (that's something lua can't do) or just wrappers for the differnt functions.
Pretty much the same in every embedded language.

Again, check the spidermonkey website for a more detailed explanation.
Mainly it's the context the script operates in. Providing the environment for the scripts.

That's (mainly) what you do. Just using a well defined niterface. Again, just read the intro pages on the spidermonkey webpage.
Infact, had you read them before starting this discussion, we could have avoided all this.

Does it do the same with C? If the LuaBind api is just C++, thats a reason not to use it. For me at least.

Right. That's we wre telling you from the beginning. As I said, if you had read the site, the whole discussion had never started.
And since you realized this now (phew... took quite some time), maybe we can stop this discussion now? Thanks.

Mainly because you can then do stuff like this in your script:

sprite.frames = "image.bmp";

Which is exactly the same as

sprite.setFrames("image.bmp");

Just without the function call. That means you can use attributes like attributes while you still ensure that you only have a single point of access. That's neat.

We never inteded to do that.
If you take alook at the discussion here, it was you who tried to convince the others not to use spidermonkey

Since it's older than LUA, I guess that's ok. And it's pretty easy to write some wrapper generting code, and the c -> js connection is IMHO simpler than the way LUA is doing it... so I don't miss LUA bind much.

As I said, that's nothing I'm concerned with. The API functions are exposed once, it's not something that I need to change often.
But yes, it would be neat to have something like luaBind.

But that's just a hassle for the engine coder. The gained benfit from javascript is IMO worth the extra (one-time) work. (Before Korval asks what benefits, I'd like to add a "see above").

at the top of http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/ it says:

The mirrors link led me to http://mirrors.xmission.com/mozilla/js/ and I grabbed it there.

[edit]
And now to continue the discussion/argument:

My choice for javascript was because, a) I've been using javascript in web for about 7 years now (the days of "ripping off" scripts and tweaking them), b) I worked with the Rhino engine (a java implementation of javascript) for scripting my own java app (although I got so into messing with rhino, the app ended up being a pretty funky javascript interface, but not what I had intended), c) lua looks ugly as hell.

Some of the nice things about javascript come from its uber-loose interface, such as the feature to leave out semicolons if you have a newline.
In one of the games I'm working with a game designer who hasn't used any programming languages before, and I'm not gonna make him learn some syntax for a language even I'm not familiar with.

As mentioned before, I don't switch between languages very easily and have trouble enough going from java to c++ within the same day (mainly because of bool/boolean though ), so it only makes sense to stick with a scripting language I'm actually real good in.

Although I haven't looked at lua scripting much, so perhaps it has this functionality, but to be able to do stuff along the lines of:

character.name = "Alexis"
character.age = 23
for (attribute in character) {
    print("character attribute " + attribute + ": " + character[attribute])
}

is one of my favorite features of javascript.

Plus this is pretty cool:

character.onhit = function (event) { ... }

You can even dynamically generate functions at runtime using eval():

function characterHit(event,character) {
  print(character.name+" got hit! HP -"+event.hitloss)
}
function makeCharacterHit(char) {
  return eval("function(event){characterHit(event,characters." + char + ")}")
}
characters.bob.onhit = makeCharacterHit("bob")
characters.fred.onhit = makeCharacterHit("fred")

Of course, that's pretty evil and it could probably be done a little cleaner than that.

[edit numero 2]
I should probably mention that I'm not trying to change what scripting language someone else is using, I was just trying to get an idea what was out there and what people felt about them. Though, I'm thinking of sticking with js, I'm obviously not going to try to convert anyone who's already using lua and liking it, since obviously they've taken the time to learn the language and are familiar with it.

I should also mention that the 500kb overhead added to the exe isn't really a big deal since the games will most likely be over 10 megs each, and possibly on CD.

Marcello

Just for your information (and for fun!):

character.name = "Alexis"
character.age = 23
for (attribute in character) {
    print("character attribute " + attribute + ": " + character[attribute])
}

is done in lua that way:

character.name = "Alexis"
character.age = 23
for attribute in character do
    print("character attribute " .. attribute .. ": " .. character[attribute])
end

-- faster alternative:
for attribute,value in character do
    print("character attribute " .. attribute .. ": " .. value)
end

Function can also be dynamically generated:

function characterHit(event,character) {
  print(character.name+" got hit! HP -"+event.hitloss)
}
function makeCharacterHit(char) {
  return eval("function(event){characterHit(event,characters." + char + ")}")
}
characters.bob.onhit = makeCharacterHit("bob")
characters.fred.onhit = makeCharacterHit("fred")

becomes:

function characterHit(event,character)
  print(character.name .. " got hit! HP - " .. event.hitloss)
end
function makeCharacterHit(char)
  return function(event) characterHit(event,characters[char]) end
end

characters.bob.onhit = makeCharacterHit("bob")
characters.fred.onhit = makeCharacterHit("fred")

As can be seen, the syntax for generating function is actually simpler in lua, (IMHO, at least )

I don't see why you find lua so ugly! But then seeing how the languages are similar in these examples, I suppose JavaScript can be an alternative, if its speed is correct. What I like about lua is the fact that everything is a (pretty fast and convenient hash table). But I don't know much about JavaScript...

except lua uses end/do which is lame by default.

Marcello

HAH!
All these loosely-typed, object-oriented,interactive,clear-syntaxed,
cross-platform scripting languages are for LOSERS!

REAL men (and women) use DOS BATCH SCRIPTS

No, real men hard code everything in asm!
Anyways, I can't seem to compile spidermonkey. I use:

C:\spidermonkey>gcc -c jsapi.c jsarena.c jsarray.c jsatm.c jsbool.c jscntxt.c js
date.c jsdbgapi.c jsdhash.c jsdtoa.c jsemit.c jsexn.c jsfile.c jsfun.c jsgc.c js
hash.c jsinterp.c jslock.c jslog2.c jslong.c jsmath.c jsnum.c jsobj.c jsopcode.c
 jsparse.c jsprf.c jsregexp.c jsscan.c jsscope.c jsscript.c jsstr.c jsutil.c jsx
drapi.c prmjtime.c -DXP_PC -DWIN32 -DEXPORT_JS_API -D_declspec=__declspec

And I get a whole bunch of errors. Here's the end of it:

I can't show them all because there are too many (it goes past the maximum amount of text on a ms-dos window ) and gcc just doesn't feel like redirecting it's output to a file (I do gcc ... >output.txt and it still go to the screen, I'm starting to think it uses a different stream, such as stderr). I've never had good luck with compiling packages like this.
EDIT: Also, I did follow spellcaster's instructions on how to compile it.

Real men/women build their own cpu with the game in the registers

It still doesn't work