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The problem with using Lua is that you lose debugging/profiling support and incur performance overhead. The loss of the debugging support afforded to Objective-
by brianchu 14y ago
The problem with using Lua is that you lose debugging/profiling support and incur performance overhead. The loss of the debugging support afforded to Objective-C code might be enough to eliminate any time saved. I do believe that Corona offers debugging support, but Corona has it's own problems: it's a cross-platform engine that necessarily incurs overhead and restricts flexibility.
Furthermore, one of the benefits of Lua that the article cites, automatic memory allocation, is obviated by using automatic reference counting in Objective-C (which also makes Obj-C more concise).
- cageface 14y agoApple has polished enough of the warts of Obj-C now that I'd be pretty reluctant to throw out all the benefits you get from tight tooling integration. I think in most cases it makes more sense to just use what Apple hath provided (but edit your code in AppCode instead of XCode).
- pygy_ 14y agoThere are remote debuggers for Lua, like Zerobrane Studio (http://studio.zerobrane.com/ http://studio.zerobrane.com/), that allows to patch the code at runtime, enabling live coding, or Koneki (http://www.eclipse.org/koneki/ldt/ http://www.eclipse.org/koneki/ldt/). I know there's more, see here for the full list of IDEs: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaIntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaIntegratedDevelopmentEnvironmen...
- outworlder 14y agoAnd yet, you cannot use a remote REPL with Objective-C, making experimentation (crucial when developing games) slow and tedious.