Posted by R. van Twisk on Mar 20, 2020; 5:27pm
URL: https://forum.librecad.org/Why-did-LibreCAD-choose-Lua-for-its-scripting-interface-tp5718588p5718589.html

For the LibreCAD 2 version we don't have an official scripting language so I assume that you are asking about LibreCAD 3.

There where 2 main reasons to pick Lua over Python:

- I don't know Python so when I had to make a decision on what scripting language to use I used Lua because I have had played around with that already... Mainly X-Plane.

- On a technical level, Lua is VERY easy to add to a C++ codebase and this included proper garbage collection handling.

That said, we are fortunately not limited to Lua. Anybody, even you could add the properr build scripts to add a Python interface. At the timeI have played around with swig but didn't found it that easy to generate stable builds with that. I see now that Swig supports Lua aswell, but I am not sure anymore if at the time this was also true...

On a personal level : Python (as a java/c++ developer) as a odd-ball I never really understand It and I just find it awkward to do anything with it . I need to keep 'googling' to do the most basic stuff with it... It's just not my thing... note: I am even faster doing things in Node than python... and I really don't like javascript!!!