squirrel VS Godot

Compare squirrel vs Godot and see what are their differences.

squirrel

Official repository for the programming language Squirrel (by albertodemichelis)
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squirrel Godot
6 2742
881 81,956
- 2.4%
3.4 10.0
2 months ago 7 days ago
C++ C++
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

squirrel

Posts with mentions or reviews of squirrel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-08-05.
  • LÖVR – An open source framework for rapidly building immersive 3D experiences
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2021
    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.
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2021
    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 = {}
  • What language(s) pair well with Rust (learning, using, etc.)? Also, what other languages did you learn before learning Rust?
    7 projects | /r/rust | 4 Aug 2021
    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.

Godot

Posts with mentions or reviews of Godot. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-02.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing squirrel and Godot you can also consider the following projects:

bevy - A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust

o3de - Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.

Cocos2d - Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.

GDevelop - :video_game: Open-source, cross-platform game engine designed to be used by everyone.

Panda3D - Powerful, mature open-source cross-platform game engine for Python and C++, developed by Disney and CMU

ursina - A game engine powered by python and panda3d.

Spring RTS game engine - A powerful free cross-platform RTS game engine. - Report issues at https://springrts.com/mantis/

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

flame - A Flutter based game engine.

Torque3D - MIT Licensed Open Source version of Torque 3D from GarageGames

FlaxEngine - Flax Engine – multi-platform 3D game engine

love - LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.