Well, I've been struggling between Lua and AngelScript some time ago, but after reading about features, pros and cons of those two scripting libraries, I think that, in my situation choosing AngelScript would be best - honestly, this compatibility with C++ (and C++ like syntax) is really amazing thing, especially after seeing some Lua scripts - it looked kinda strange :-/

Reason I asked about performance, is that recently I've made technical demo which uses OpenGL for rendering some 2D textures, particle effects etc. I was... shocked by the amount of FPS I got - I was expecting something bigger. (ok, in fact, this tech demo wasn't optimized - but that don't matter much here. The fact is, it's slow - and AFAIK it shouldn't be).

So, in the finished game I'm writing now, probably there will be much more graphics, particles, effects etc. on the screen at once + music + sounds + AI + other things, so it would be generally a good idea to get as fast scripting language as I can get - probably, every little CPU cycle will count... and that's why I asked when you will be done with those optimizations - so that I could know when to start incorporating scripts into engine :-) and - what's more important - is there a chance that those changes will arrive before I should release game.


Anyway, probably I won't finish this game very soon, so I'll use Angelscript :-)

If any JIT-compiler is to be used I'd prefer SoftWire :)
http://softwire.sourceforge.net/

Think of this as two sides of a fence. On the left side you have all the engine logic being written in C and on the right side you have all the game logic written in a scripting lang. The game logic should not be invoked frequently but once it is from other script or script function then it uses C functions to do its thing, nice and fast. So all the high frequency code is concentrated in those engine side C functions. You do not want to do physics code by calling script functions that compute the physics solution. I think this is one of the important points to remember. Read up Epic's unrealEd scripting notes to see what I mean. Better yet, examine QuakeC's scripts and see what kind of C functions it uses to do its thing fast.

Also, script slowness was the main reason why Doom3 uses DLLs. It also makes debugging easier since you can use VC++ IDE.