Scripting in the longer term (was: Re: possible security problems)

allefant <allefant@gmail.com>:
> Yes, any possible future AI or scripting additions should be discussed
> on the forum of course. Just was trying to clarify why I think the
> PythonAI failed - just generally blaming "Python" would be a bit
> simple-minded and not help prevent similar problems in the future.
> Ivanovic mentioned work on Lua scripting in the initial post of the
> thread - so my impression was this already is or will soon be
> available in SVN, I wouldn't really have suggested it otherwise :)

As much as I like Python, I'm almost completely convinced now that lua
is a better path in the long term - and when I say "almost
completely", I mean "unless there's a large un-obvious fuck-up in the
lua design or implementation".

There are three application domains in play here:

(1) AI plugins in a scrioting language
(2) WML extension in a scripting language
(3) Replacing Wesnoth core code in a scripting language

lua looks like a winner in two of these areas: (1) because it can actually
sandbox cleanly, (2) because we've already got a candidate patch that
looks promising.   

It also looks pretty plausible to me for (3) because lua's native
extension facilities luabind appear to be easier and more powerful
than Python's - and that's a strong statement, because I know Python's
embedding features and they're pretty good.

By contrast, Python has a known sandboxing problem blocking (1) pretty
hard, there's not even a blue-sky plan for (2).

Take this seriously, because it's the project's biggest fan of Python
talking.  I'll continue to use Python for out-of-core tools and like it,
but...I'm gonna learn lua.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>