[daenz]

This was refreshing. I'm struggling with the same problem...I've embedded Lua in my C++ engine for high-level scripting. Unfortunately, as my scenes became more and more complex, I found myself struggling with representing the inheritance hierarchies in Lua, as well as things like object ownership/gc (resorting to passing around shared_ptrs in Lua userdatas). And for each new data type, I had to write the same old C++ boilerplate to make it available in Lua the way I needed to. The complexity is getting to be too much.

I think this article is going to push me to strip out the embedded Lua from the engine and use plain old C++ as well. Great read!

[djur]

Embedded scripting languages seem to work best on what I'd call a 90/10 model. Either your game is written in the scripting language inside a thin compiled shell (to provide access to system routines and the occasional optimization), or your game is written almost entirely in the host language and just configured using scripts. So: 90% Lua, 10% C++ or vice versa, but not 50/50 or the like.

In general, it seems to be a red flag if a single thread of logic runs back and forth between host and scripting contexts.

[yoklov]

Alternatively, write most of it in C++ and allow it to be extended with components written in script, ECS style.

Or something else.

Honestly, having too much scrip is very much a thing to try and avoid. Perf (gc, etc), long term maintainability (usually no static types in script), tooling (frequently no debuggers, profilers, or the ones that exist are low quality), etc are all reasons for this.

If you're going to have 90% lua, you probably should be writing the game in lua anyway...