"It uses a syntax similar to Python (blocks are indent-based and many keywords are similar)."
And[1]:
"If you've ever written anything in a language like Python before then you'll feel right at home."
So it's more than just whitespace.
I seem to recall it being acknowledged that Python was a big influence on GDScript's design and in a number of cases "How does Python handle this?" drove some of the design decisions.
You are not wrong, but the original point was that GDScript is slow because its syntax is similar to Python's and Python is slow. That just doesn't make any sense.
> The default language in the engine is basically python, so it could cause a performance bottleneck.
python is slow because the extreme flexibility of the language makes it very difficult for compilers/interpreters to perform analysis that could allow optimisations
this doesn't have anything to do with the syntax. we could completely replace python syntax with e.g. pyc bytecode or serialised AST data but the language would still be challenging to execute efficiently as the language is still exactly the same
one can get a few ideas of how python could perhaps be made faster by reading about all the restrictions that rpython imposes
But why did they chose to invent GDScript and not chose to use/embed python itself?
Using a newly invented special purpose language is something that often discourages me from considering a tool/framework.
"It uses a syntax similar to Python (blocks are indent-based and many keywords are similar)."
And[1]:
"If you've ever written anything in a language like Python before then you'll feel right at home."
So it's more than just whitespace.
I seem to recall it being acknowledged that Python was a big influence on GDScript's design and in a number of cases "How does Python handle this?" drove some of the design decisions.
[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/scrip...
[1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-i...