kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 02/24/2012 08:54 AM, Miguel Angel Ajo Pelayo wrote:
> Ok, I changed the topic of this thread, to match the discussion, which 
> is about making Kicad fully scriptable in Javascript.
>
> For speed reasons, and wide adoption, it seems that V8 must be 
> our preferred engine.
Hi Miguel,

Did you consider using Lua as an alternative to JS? I've seen lots of 
applications scripted in Lua, but not too many using JS, A****m Designer 
being a notable example. There are a few reasons to adopt it:
- It's extremely small: JIT VM is ~400 kB DLL/DSO with zero external 
dependencies,
- provides integrated I/O libraries - there's no need for additional 
frameworks in the middle, like NodeJS,
- beats every other VMed/interpreted language at execution speed. At 
certain benchmarks, it outperforms V8 by an order of magnitude,
- works out-of-the box with SWIG and other wrapper generators,
- integrates nicely with wxWidgets (http://wxlua.sourceforge.net/), 
facilitating easy GUI development for scripts.

I'm not claiming that Lua should be the only scripting language 
available in Kicad, but it's certainly got some advantages over the rest :)

Regards,
Tom