In the last 2 weeks, I looked over (not actually tried) all the scripting languages known to man (ok, known to google
![](smile.gif)
).
The one that stood out most was, of course, Lua. Everyone said a lot of nice things about it, and it seemed like Lua is the cure for cancer. I spent quite some tiem looking at how to bind it with my code, how it''s syntax looks like, etc. What I didn''t like was the stack mechanism used to pass values lua<->host. I also didn''t like the syntax at ALL. I mean, I know 2 assembly languages, I know C, Basic, and I know PHP. Knowing 3 different grammar sets (php/c and z80/x86 ASM are relatively gramatically equivalent) is enough, I don''t want to learn somethign as unstanadard as LUA.
I skipped over Phyton because it is ugly looking, BIG, and I heard it''s slow (I even seen it in action, as a Blender plugin, and it IS slow).
Next I looked over a Forth dialect scripting engine, and I kind of liked it, but there were 2 problems:
1. There was no (apparent) way to call various functions, from the host (only one entry function)
2. Forth is very low level, so a lot of people might not like writting scripts in Forth.
Ruby had a syntax nightmare, and a pure OOP design, and I totally disliked that.
Then there were some GPL C like languages, but I didn''t like the fact they were GPL (couldn''t live with the GPL license).
I looked over the SpiderMokney JS thing, but no matter how hard I tried to find out, I couldn''t determine if it was an interpreted thing, or it actually had a VM. For safety reasons, I decided not to use it.
Finally, I found a language, called
SMALL, that has ALL the things I wanted:
1. It''s fast
2. Is multiplatform
3. Very easy to integrate in your host program, and it''s easy to call any function from/to your scripts.
4. It is very C (or PHP) like.
5. Has a very fast VM (especially the ASM build)
6. It''s under the Zlib license, which allows you to do pretty much everythign with the code, as long as you mark your modifications, do not claim you wrote it, and include a copy of the license with your distribution.
Anyway, if you want a flexible, robust, lightweight, free, c like scripting language, then Small is the way to go! I am very very happy with it