I have to say, and have been saying for a long time, that having to hand code this stuff (as is done in SquirrelPlus or DXSquirrel), is extremely laborious. Not to mention its extremely error prone when most of this code is just basic plumbing that requires no brain at all. Its easy to make mistakes here.


There needs to be somekind of way to automate it. Yes, I agree that you don't always want a 1:1 mapping to C++, but a lot of times you do, or if anything, you want the ability to automatically generate the bindings for some arbitrary subset of your C++ API.


The closest thing that has come to doing this has been SQUADD. I hoped SQUADD would be the holy grail here but it has gone through numerous revisions and doesn't have any documentation. Plus there are a lot of edge cases with C++ class types (inheritence, etc.) that seemed to have trouble.


As it is now, SqPlus to me is not really any better than binding everything by hand without any helper library. Hopefully someone will take the next step and take SqPlus to the template generation level at least as an option. Until then I still have not been able to fully integrate Squirrel into my projects, it just takes way too much time to do this stuff by hand, and its error prone.


Sorry for complaining :(

Yeah I guess I am a bit bummed that Squirrel has not developed a following large enough to have someone do this yet. Its been a long time coming. I see Squirrel as being a lot better than Lua in terms of syntax and even features, but Lua has become like a blind religion, and this was going on even when it had obvious perofrmance impacts due to its garbage collection scheme.


I think Squadd was based on boost stuff, so I agree that something simpler is needed like LuaPlus.

I understand, you've been more than generous in the first place. The only thig I can see you doing at this point is maybe releasing NutPad? To help knock down the debugging barriar in Squirrel. Did your company ever say if it was ok for you to do that?



At this point I don't have the time to muddle through LuaPlus and hack something together, I'd be willing to pay someone to do it and release it to the community as open source. If anyone feels like they can do a solid implementation of what we're talking about, get back to me, and let's talk. Squirrel needs a boost (no pun intended).

Joshua Jensen contacted me a bit more than a year ago, proposing to do something like LuaPlus with squirrel. However is intention was to merge the code base and I disagreed. So he went back to his own path. To me seems that LuaPlus and luarc are inspired by squirrel's memory management(I even read some JJ post on lua's mailing list discussing squirrel's memory model).


If something like LuaPlus happens for squirrel, it wont 'pollute' the language core. However I'm fine to tweak squirrel's API to match a bit more a ipotetical library(if strictly needed). I'm also fine of putting it on squirrel's sourceforge project/website, as separated package. I also suggest to not call it SQPlus sounds too much like a clone, I can alredy ear people saying "but luaplus does it this way...bla bla".


Btw, I took a look at LuaPlus templates etc... and I must say isn't really my style, I still prefer a light weight macro approach. But well that's just me I guess, I'm not a bit fan of metaprogramming in C++.


ciao


Alberto