[gustavus]

> but I find it hard to see it as anything but a toy scripting language. Seems like it would be a real mess with a big,

We are talking about GDScript not JavaScript.... Oh wait, the parallels are remarkable

Simple language designed to be easy to learn: Check

Turns large codebases into a tangled lovecraftian mess of spaghetti code: Check

Likely to be someone's first introduction to programming languages: Check

Honestly reading the criticisms of GDScript so far is convincing me more and more that Godot is quickly going to become the next big thing, especially if the developers can figure out how to get people to use it for thier first programming project. After all most people I know who got into development started because they wanted to make their own video game.

[eddythompson80]

As others have mentioned, JavaScript also has had over 20 years of serious investment from the best minds in the industry to improve it. We now have V8, TypeScript and plethora of tools that make writing serious applications possible or even preferable. I seriously would take TypeScript over most languages any day.

How likely would you say the same effort is gonna go into GDScript?

[johnnyanmac]

>How likely would you say the same effort is gonna go into GDScript?

Hard to predict. We're still in the web 1.0 phase of Godot and dealing with questions like why we made a <blink> tag. We could get serious talent addressing the binding layers, we could simply have a few key bottlenecks addressed, or we accept GDScript as the slow path and diverge. It could also simply fade away, but many don't want that, and I'm also not too interested in deprecating something many have used to launch full games.

Personally, my goal is less about making a scripting language perform as well as c++ and more about having options to make sure people can port from GDScript to some faster binding if/when they run into performance bottlenecks. At worst, maybe a migration tool may be needed. Hard, but more doable than any of the above overhauls.

[gustavus]

Well that's a point a lot of other people have raised and is the one I am trying to make, Godot and the associated ecosystem could become like the next generations Javascript. Companies didn't start investing an enormous amount of time and effort into improving JS because they wanted to, they did it because they adopted it and then ran into cases where they needed the performance.

My point being that a lot of the concerns are not foundational to Godot and GDScript and can be improved if there is an investment. But that investment will come with adoption, not the other way around.

[krapp]

Javascript only got the investment it did because it was the only language that would run in a web browser, when the web suddenly became a billion dollar business and javascript developers were a dime a dozen. Godot is able to support multiple languages. The goal should be improving and expanding language support, not repeating the necessary evil of making Javascript the One True Programming Language.