sol2

Interesting, I don't find modern C++ verbose at all. 'auto', range-based for-loops and structured bindings did a great job at reducing the verbosity of C++98. On top of that, C++ allows to design very concise APIs. (One of my favorite examples is sol2: https://github.com/ThePhd/sol2). Library code involving templates, on the other hand, can be pretty complex and hard to read. Concepts and other C++20 features (like [[no_unique_address]]) are certainly an improvement, but only new projects with no backwards compatibility requirements can actually use them (unconditionally).

If you implement the actual game logic in a scripting language like Lua, hot reloading becomes trivial. sol2 is a really awesome Lua binding library for C++: https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2

Is it possible to use Pluto alongside with a binding library such as Sol2[0]? I don't mind not being able to set type hints in the bindings to use in some IDE, I can create stubs for it manually. [0]: https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2

PSA: if you are using (modern) C++, https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 makes embedding Lua incredibly easy and straightforward.

The Lua C API is fantastic from a design perspective, but as you have discovered, it is rather error prone. Fortunately, there are many wrapper libraries that take care of all the stack manipulation. For example, I'm using https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 to interface with C++ and the API is incredibly ergonomic.

Off topic, but this is the author of my favourite Lua C++ binding library (https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2). Great guy!

I mean, if you could tell from my original post, I like C++ templates. The point is not to constantly write templates in your calling code, the point is to architect a library with templates that affords flexibility and dynamism so that the calling code is easy to write, read, and reason about. Consider, for example, the sol2[0] example usage code vs the actual source code itself[1]. 0. https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 1. https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2/blob/develop/include/sol/func...

Very interesting article! Unfortunately, it doesn't mention Lua, which in my opinion has one of the most elegant C APIs that I have seen. It is entirely stack based, which means you only need to work with primitive types, such as numbers, C strings and user provided opaque pointers. As a consequence, you never have to care about memory management because Lua doesn't even let you access the actual Lua objects. You want to create a table (= Lua's dictionary/array hybrid) and set a field "foo" to 5? lua_newtable() creates a new table and pushes it onto the stack. Then you push "foo" with lua_pushstring() and 5 with lua_pushnumber(). Finally you call lua_settable(), which pops the key and value from the stack, checks if the top of the stack contains a table, and if yes, sets the given field to the given value. The actual table structure is ne

Similarly, Fennel [1] is a Lisp which compiles to Lua, and Lua is well supported in both C++ [2] and Rust [3]. Fennel’s a very reasonable option for delivering S-expression based user interactivity — e.g. REPLs and scriptable config [4]. [1]: https://fennel-lang.org/ [2]: https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 [3]: https://github.com/amethyst/rlua [4]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/include-fnl

Well, by this I mean "unfamiliar to me", of course. Lol. Actually Lua is something to consider from the point of view of usage: it is an industry standard actually. However, all those small quirks in semantics... and classes can be done in many ways (that is what I understand, via metatables)... In ChaiSCript or Wren there is one true way and you are done. You might like it or not, but it leads to less confusion, especially if you use most of the time what is in the mainstream. This is by no means a bad thing in itself, it is just about how ergonomic or time-consuming it could be for myself: I just feel more comfortable with ChaiScript, Wren or Squirrel than with Lua. Even AngelsCript is also more similar to what you already have. So when exposing APIs there is much less friction. Truth to be told, there is also https://github.com/ThePhD/