I recently started to see how to integrate a generic script language into my voxel editor Goxel.

I want to use something light and easily embeddable into a C application. One obvious choice for this is to use Lua, but I also wanted to try Duktape, a lightweight JavaScript interpreter. In this post I’ll give some of my conclusions after trying both.

1. SIMPLICITY TO EMBED

Both Lua and Duktape are relatively easy to embed into a C application. They use the same stack based approach that is both flexible and simple in term of API. The C functions you want to expose need to take a stack object from which you can retrieve the arguments passed to the function. Output from functions are also passed into a stack.

Duktape API is almost identical to Lua, so there is not much to compare here. I tend to find Duktape API slightly simpler, mostly because the library is provided as a single C file with a corresponding header file.

1. DOCUMENTATION

In my opinion Duktape has a better documentation than Lua. Most of the time just reading the comments in the header file is enough to find what a function does. The online doc is using nice diagrams to explain how each function will affect the stack. This is really helpful since it’s not always obvious if a call will pop it’s arguments from the stack or not.

Lua’s website contains a link to a free version of the book ‘programming in Lua’, but it only covers Lua 5.2 and so some of the examples are not working anymore.

2. LANGUAGES

Lua interprets it’s own language, while Duktape is just one of the many interpreters of JavaScript (specifically ECMAScript E5). Both languages have some good and bad things in my opinion. JavaScript is probably the most popular language these days, so it might seem like the obvious choice.

Things I like in Lua: the meta-object model is quite clever. The language uses a special syntax for method call (using colon instead of a dot), which makes the conceptual model of objects very natural and flexible. In comparison JavaScript object support seems poor. The introduction of Proxy objects helps a bit at the cost of an other layer of complexity.

One thing I don’t like much in Lua is the fact that the arrays are one indexed. This is specially annoying for Goxel since the scripts will have to index into multi dimensional arrays for which zero indexed is the only sane way. As an example, this is how you would index a 2d image memory block in Lua:

img[(y - 1) * w + x]

While in JavaScript you simply have:

img[y * w + x]

As for javascript, in my opinion the most annoying thing is the confusing coercion rules. For example in Javascript:

[1, 2] + [3, 4]

Evaluate to the string:

'1, 23, 4'

An other problem with Javascript is that as of ES5, there is no easy way to create multi line strings.

3. SPEED

This is where Lua is the clear winner. In my test scripts, I got results twice as fast with Lua than what I get with duktape. For most scripts that is probably not an issue, but in Goxel I would like to generate large 3D volumes from parametric functions, and for this the speed of the script interpreter is going to be critical.

CONCLUSION

At this time, I am still unsure what I should use, though I tend to think I will go for Lua. Duktape seems the most future proof choice, since JavaScript is so popular, but the performances penalty is quite high. I thought about trying other JavaScript interpreters, but it seems most of them are too heavy for my use.