It's cool to see Lua in the browser, yes, but it's been there for a while already.
I also am skeptical about LÖVE (what Aroma's based on) being ready for commercial games. I've asked LÖVE supporters what commercial games were built on that platform, and they came up completely empty. Bringing a game to release quality tends to find all of the corners of a library that are not production-ready.
Moai has a number of serious users, though, including Double Fine.
Why do all löve articles get spammed about moai here?
Apart from lua, they have nothing in common, different target, different goal. Both can be successful in their own niche.
I use löve for teaching, there is no way I would have considered moai for a first application of my algorithmic course! And frankly, I do not care about "serious users".
The hook was that it was a "Native Game Client Powered by Lua".
If you don't care about serious users, then you're free to choose appropriately. A lot of people do use löve; they must all have their reasons. I don't see how Moai is not relevant to this discussion, though.
People clicking on the comments may be considering writing a serious game; if not, they can play with löve and have fun, but if they are, I wanted to warn them about what I'd found.
The problem is, while a high-quality freeware game like mari0 does mean that LÖVE does meet the minimum feature set you'd need for a game, it doesn't mean it has the tools or widgets or features you'd need in a commercial game.
For example, does the game render and perform well on all target platforms? For a freeware game, if it doesn't work on some video card, so what. For a commercial game, it means support headaches, lost revenues, and bad reviews and/or user comments.
I don't think it makes sense to attribute any special amount of quality to Moai; IIRC only one commercial-quality game (Crimson Steam Pirates) has been released in it. DFA will count once it's out, I guess, but that's a ways away.
Having used Moai myself I wouldn't really call it commercial quality. The documentation is poor, the code is cryptic, and it tends to crash or do strange things instead of report errors. It also fails to abstract out hardware limitations or notify you of them (for example, it'll let you use 4Kx4K textures and then when you run on a machine with a 2Kx2K limit, Moai just falls over instead of providing clear error feedback or scaling-down the texture.)
I haven't used Moai myself; that's good information. Thanks.
By the time Moai was released, I had already created my own Moai-equivalent C/C++/Lua framework. I've written a game on it already, and one other developer (a company I used to work with who asked for access) is using it, but I haven't released it to the public.
When I discovered Moai I was a bit skeptical about it; they've written all their Lua bindings by hand, which isn't terrible, but they're bound to Lua 5.0...meaning that you can't drop in LuaJIT and have scripts run 3x-100x faster. Since I had my own library already, I decided not to switch.
And their model seems to be (like löve) that you have a monolithic build that just runs Lua code, whereas I prefer keeping the C++ build process around so I can drop into C or C++ easily, adding or removing modules as I need them. For instance it appears they have TWO 2d physics engines as part of the build, along with lots of other libraries that I may or may not need, resulting in 6+ megabytes of binary, while mine comes in comfortably under 2Mb.
Auto-generating Lua bindings makes this easier as well -- if I need to add another library, I just drop it in and run my binding generation script; other than adding any new source files to the various projects, that's it.
But strictly considering löve vs. Moai, I still have to advise people to lean toward Moai.
For the documentation, it is constantly improving. The API docs still have weak points, but the high level overview and the (now partly annotated) examples go a long way. You may want to check these pages:
I'm using MOAI professionally, and none of your points are of any concern so far .. we've definitely been very productive with MOAI, and sure - the documentation needs work, but for a 1.0 release, MOAI packs an immensely powerful punch. If you're a pro mobile developer, you can't afford to not investigate MOAI - its an extremely powerful tool that is going to be used for more and more releases .. (and yes it already has NaCL support - as well as Windows, Mac OSX, iOS, Android .. and LINUX host support too..)
While I'm concerned that Chrome is the only browser supporting native client (Mozilla outright rejected it), it's still awesome to see lua in the browser.
I do not recall ActiveX running in MacOsX or Linux. I do not understand when People are completely ok when a game is Windows only but when it is in Chrome suddenly preaches multi-browser compatibility. To me, NACL is not a mistake, it is future. Oh also it is damn open source.
I'm in two minds, I want a near native code execution environment in the browser but wonder if something like Xax offers better room for performance of dynamic generated code.
The fact that you're comparing NaCl to ActiveX suggests maybe you don't actually understand what NaCl is?
NaCl is a platform independent secure code execution environment. It is NOT a way to talk to the underlying OS like ActiveX. Is is NOT a way to write plugins like ActiveX.
It's effectively just another way to write code in a browser like JavaScript. Is has no more or less permissions than JavaScript. It is no more or less access to APIs then JavaScript. It just has 5 to 100x more speed than JavaScript depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Publicly they have stated that it's because they think JS is fast enough.
I think that they have some private issues regarding a plugin controlled solely by their browser competitor who wants NaCl apps to be purchased through the Chrome Webstore.
NaCl constrains the CPU architectures that the web can run on. No one is going to compile for anything but x86 and ARM. Some people might not even bother to compile for ARM. This seems bad. (If NaCl were widely adopted 5 years ago, the web would be much less accessible to mobile devices.)
"If NaCl were widely adopted 5 years ago, the web would be much less accessible to mobile devices."
I don't agree with this. From what I've read NaCl isn't even getting auto-run by default. It is not trying to replace JS just sit alongside it as an application language. It lets developers target CPU architectures instead of Operating Systems which makes a lot of sense to me.
Also it's C/C++, any popular app would be easily ported to mobile devices.
Look how far JS has come in 5 years, imagine how for NaCl could have come.
On your PNaCl point, it may not be optimal but I love the idea. "Compile to javascript" is an awful concept, "compile to IR" is better for a number of reasons that I won't go into right now.
> I don't agree with this. From what I've read NaCl isn't even getting auto-run by default. It is not trying to replace JS just sit alongside it as an application language. It lets developers target CPU architectures instead of Operating Systems which makes a lot of sense to me.
Even if it's not trying to replace JS, if it works well enough, a lot of sites will use it to replace JS, whether because they want to add functionality that's not as easy to implement in JS, because they don't want to expose their source, or just because their programmers don't know/like JS. We have already been through this with ActiveX, which was a similar idea, but poorly executed.
> Also it's C/C++, any popular app would be easily ported to mobile devices.
Only if the developers care. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here. If your mobile platform can't interact properly with a large proportion of the web, no one is going to buy it, and so no one will bother to port their site to it.
> "Compile to javascript" is an awful concept, "compile to IR" is better for a number of reasons that I won't go into right now.
Possibly. If you absolutely have to run C/C++ app on the client side, I agree that something like PNaCl (but actually architecture-independent) is a better solution than something like emscripten. But I think it would be even better to 1) run it server side or 2) write it in JavaScript.
It has most of the positive traits of JavaScript with less of the negative traits.
A few examples:
Strings in Lua are interned, which makes it possible to efficiently use string keys in all sorts of places instead of numeric enumerations.
Lua's garbage collector has support for running incrementally with a configurable pause time, so you can run it in the background every frame to avoid those nasty GC pauses you still get in most modern browser games from stop-the-world collections.
Debugging is built into the language with a user-accessible API that lets you write your own debugger or diagnostic tool, in addition to using third-party ones, instead of having to rely on the vendor to provide one.
Lua uses a single container type for storing data, with an efficient representation (densely packed elements are stored in an actual array; sparsely packed elements and elements with non-integral keys are stored in a hashmap). As a result, operations on sequences/containers only ever have to think about one data type, and you still get the near-optimal performance you would in JS if you manually used Array/Object where most appropriate.
> Strings in Lua are interned, which makes it possible to efficiently use string keys in all sorts of places instead of numeric enumerations.
Interning is an implementation detail. I don't know how they are implemented off the top of my head, but string keys are pretty damn fast in most JS JITs, since they're used to get e.g. methods of objects.
> Lua's garbage collector has support for running incrementally with a configurable pause time, so you can run it in the background every frame to avoid those nasty GC pauses you still get in most modern browser games from stop-the-world collections.
Again, this is an implementation detail. Firefox is about to get incremental GC. While the pause time isn't configurable, it doesn't really matter as long as it's short by default.
> Debugging is built into the language with a user-accessible API that lets you write your own debugger or diagnostic tool, in addition to using third-party ones, instead of having to rely on the vendor to provide one.
Gecko and WebKit both have debugging APIs. I will concede that it's a PITA that they're different.
> Lua uses a single container type for storing data, with an efficient representation (densely packed elements are stored in an actual array; sparsely packed elements and elements with non-integral keys are stored in a hashmap). As a result, operations on sequences/containers only ever have to think about one data type, and you still get the near-optimal performance you would in JS if you manually used Array/Object where most appropriate.
Again, this is an implementation detail. In JS, Array is a subclass of Object and in most JITs I think it's implemented the same way. The only difference is how they serialize to JSON and that Array has a length property. Lua has an advantage in that it gives arrays both sparse and dense slots, but this isn't necessarily impossible to do in JS either (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=586842)
Objects are the only complex data type in JavaScript (sans E4X). Arrays are objects (typeof (new Array()) === "object"), and prototypical inheritance is built on top of objects.
The implementation of the Lua and now LuaJIT2 VMs are part of the reason for the language success. It's had good performance and low memory overhead for almost two decades (the incremental gc came in 2006).
Agree, Lua has its pearls, but I think, today it is used in larger scale projects than it was initially intended. Language-wise, I prefer UnrealScript or similar, with a "classic" OO and preferably with a static typing.
http://getmoai.com/
It's cool to see Lua in the browser, yes, but it's been there for a while already.
I also am skeptical about LÖVE (what Aroma's based on) being ready for commercial games. I've asked LÖVE supporters what commercial games were built on that platform, and they came up completely empty. Bringing a game to release quality tends to find all of the corners of a library that are not production-ready.
Moai has a number of serious users, though, including Double Fine.