I think it’s about time to issue a KoboldScript status update. KoboldScript is Lua scripting for cocos2d, in case you didn’t know. In the near future it’ll be released as part of the KoboldScript Game Kit project. I showcased KoboldScript before here and here.
Static bindings, manual labor
One big advantage of KoboldScript over other script language solutions available for cocos2d is that the KoboldScript binding is static, ie it is done at compile time. There’s very little runtime overhead to it, thanks to SWIG. So in terms of performance it’s miles ahead of Wax, LuaCocoa or other dynamic scripting language bindings like JSCocoa. And it is compatible with both Mac OS X and iOS.
The big problem with static bindings is that you have to somehow define each class, each method, each property and write lots of glue code. In the past, I did this manually. It involved writing a C wrapper method for SWIG and usually an Objective-C dispatch function went along with it. On the Lua side the function needed to be registered as well. It’s an error prone, repetitive, boring task. Perfect for code generation! Continue reading »
