ChaiScript VS squirrel

is it like https://chaiscript.com/?

3) Similiar to 2, but use more common scripting languages: chai, cs-script, sol2 (c++ framework to embed lua)

A few years back I actually went and made a ChaiScript based video game engine (https://16bpp.net/blog/post/masala-a-chaiscript-game-engine/). The end goal for it was to be able to make a Pacman like clone, but have all of the game logic implemented in ChaiScript. I actually found out as I added more realtime elements (implemented in ChaiScript) that it started to take much longer to process the game logic; the "game loop FPS" was under 60, which is not good. I actually proposition that ChaiScript move to a bytecode VM (https://github.com/ChaiScript/ChaiScript/issues/266), but I'm guessing that no movement was made on that front.

Maybe ChaiScript? It is not exactly what you are looking for, but very similar, in my opinion.

A question: would it be too much work to port Love2D to a different embedding language? (I'm currently having looks at Squirrel (http://www.squirrel-lang.org/) I always thought Lua was tightly coupled with the framework, but what you've mentioned seems to imply that's not the case.

Lua is a language that I started programming with, and has a special place in my heart even if has some crappy parts.

The main issue I have with the language is with table accesses and 'nil'. Tables in Lua are the most fundamental type of objects in the language, it can be either an array (1-based index) or a hashtable. In this language objects are basically just tables with fields in them, and with metatables you can basically emulate all the features in a typical OOP language (classes, inheritance, traits, operator overloading, etc.) Field access in objects are just table accesses (like what you can imagine with Javascript).

However, when you try to access a field in a table that doesn't exist (such as 'print(table.key_that_doesnt_exist)'): no errors or exceptions are explicitly raised, it just silently returns nil. This is such a dealbreaker that makes the language much harder to debug than other languages (at least Javascript returns undefined, which is different from null! Oh well, that actually has problems of its own though....) Some more horror: global variables are also implemented as tables (imagine that there's a table _G at the top of the scope). This means that any spelling mistakes with variables will also just silently return nil, since if it doesn't find any variable names at the local scope, it tries to find at the global scope.

The global variable thing was actually such a big problem that people came up with some voodoo metatable trickery script that prevents this from happening (a showcase of the language's power, but probably not its proudest). I'm sure you could also do this with table creation (make a wrapper function tbl() that automatically adds metatables to prevent invalid field access, so every time you need to do things like 'pos = tbl({x = 1, y = 2})') But still, there isn't a solution baked into the language, and it's cumbersome to do this.

Right now I'm trying to integrate Squirrel (http://www.squirrel-lang.org/) instead of Lua as a scripting language into my game. Squirrel is an embedded scripting language that's hugely inspired from Lua, but also fixes this shortcoming of the language by making invalid table accesses runtime errors. And when you want to add new fields to a table you need to explicitly do so via the <- operator:

    table = {}

The second one that comes to mind is Squirrel, which is a compiled language designed to be embedded into other programs. It’s similar to lua in concept, but closer to C in syntax. I never did a lot with it, but I did learn it.