love VS squirrel

Compare love vs squirrel and see what are their differences.

love

LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua. (by love2d)

squirrel

Official repository for the programming language Squirrel (by albertodemichelis)
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love squirrel
258 6
4,223 881
5.3% -
9.6 3.4
7 days ago 2 months ago
C++ C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later 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.

love

Posts with mentions or reviews of love. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-17.
  • Ask HN: Yo wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

    There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

    I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

    Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

  • Gearing up for Lua
    3 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024
    Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.
  • Original Sling'n'shoot Worms Game
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023
    I got it – these are the steps I took:

    1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

  • Can't make my mind about which engine to use
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 10 Dec 2023
    libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame
  • How Do I Compile/Install Love 0.10.2 on Linux?
    2 projects | /r/love2d | 7 Dec 2023
    So I was stuck with my only other method: compiling from source, which I have absolutely no experience in. I'm told I have to install Git, put in "$ git clone https://github.com/love2d/love.git" into the terminal to, well, clone the repository, and that's where I hit a dead end.
    2 projects | /r/love2d | 7 Dec 2023
    You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:
  • Not only Unity...
    53 projects | /r/opensourcegames | 11 Nov 2023
    Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love
  • Ask HN: Released games built on FOSS engines?
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Oct 2023
    - Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org
  • How to have the coolest booth at a tech conference 🕹👾
    3 projects | dev.to | 3 Oct 2023
    The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.
  • I want to make a game but I'm scared...
    3 projects | /r/gamedev | 15 Sep 2023
    love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience

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.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

MonoGame - One framework for creating powerful cross-platform games.

Godot Card Game Framework - A framework which comes with prepared scenes and classes to kickstart your card game, as well as a powerful scripting engine to use to provide full rules enforcement.

TIC-80 - TIC-80 is a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.

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

ChaiScript - Embedded Scripting Language Designed for C++

Phaser - Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering. [Moved to: https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser]

Arcade - Easy to use Python library for creating 2D arcade games.

flixel - Free, cross-platform 2D game engine powered by Haxe and OpenFL

SadConsole - A .NET ascii/ansi console engine written in C# for MonoGame and XNA. Create your own text roguelike (or other) games!

Duktape - Duktape - embeddable Javascript engine with a focus on portability and compact footprint