sol2 VS Fennel

As someone said, make the game data-driven is a good first step but I will say, also have some sort of way to add additional game logic. For C++ games, lua is really easy to embed the interpreter in your C++ binary, read in the files from a directory (like /mods) with the C++ filesystem api new in C++17, and it's very easy to use SoL to write an API for lua specific to your game. Many games use lua in this way and it's probably the most common mod path setup.

I've only ever done this from C++, but it's using the same lua C library, so should be durable from C as well. You can look up how sol2 or any other wrapper libraries do it.

Consider sol2

This version relies on a Lua C++ wrapper called sol2 to hide Lua stack management from the developer, so creating new bindings can be done by adding a few lines of human-readable C++. It still has to be done manually, but at least sol2 is able to automatically figure out types of objects being bound, so it's not much different from our de-/serialization code.

Here's an example: sol2

Here is link number 2 - Previous text "Sol"

Have you considered using sol2? https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 Or if you don't want to switch over, you can at least look at their code and see how they handle this.

It is half of a pun as I was inspired by [sol3](https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2) which is a lua <-> c++ wrapper. Sol means sun and the julia c-api prefixes all it's functions with jl, luna means moon so it is pronounced "jay luna"

If you want to be portable I'd recommend C++ and Lua, I used those for years and it runs on everything and there's this most amazing wrapper API which was a huge inspiration

Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

https://fennel-lang.org

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

* https://fennel-lang.org/

I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.

If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.

There's fennel if you're a fan of LISP syntax. I like embedding lua because it's light and easy and doesn't re-engineer itself every six months like python; but I agree, the lua syntax certainly is fugly.