

Imma be the guy and drop an ackshually
- Nothing about Lua would make it difficult to implement a physics engine in it compared to other languages
- The hardest part would be integrating with Morrowind’s systems. If the engine doesn’t expose e.g. collision geometry to scripts in an efficient way, then you’ll run into some real challenges
- Even without LuaJIT, there’s no reason to expect performance so bad you can’t implement realtime rigid body physics. Interpreted Lua is fast, but even if it wasn’t, a 60 fps performance target for physics is not tough to achieve at all
“order of magnitude” typically means 10x. A reasonable Lua implementation of rigidbody physics isn’t going to be 10+ times slower than an equivalent C++ version. C++ provides a lot more tools for optimization than Lua, so you’re unlikely to find a truly apples-to-apples comparison showing the difference between a Lua and C++ that isn’t a benchmark of the particular algorithms in the implementations.
To be clear, I’m not saying Lua is faster or as fast as C++, just that you’re making it sound as if Lua is too slow for something like this. I know this isn’t a programming community, but we’re talking about programming languages, so I feel compelled to point stuff like this out.
None of this is true.
It is specifically a problem with embeddable languages like Lua because they’re limited by what is exposed to its VM and how. In the context of modding physics into Morrowind, it’s possible that not everything you’d need is cleanly exposed through Lua (which afaik is implemented with a third party plugin and not natively supported).
At the risk of sounding like a dick, I think you’re bullshitting. I doubt you’ve ever seen any physics engine implemented in Lua before, much less benchmarked them or evaluated them for their “efficient” and “accurate” qualities (which are meaningless terms). Lua physics engines certainly exist, but they’re mostly gimmicks interesting to developers to study/learn as there aren’t many real world use cases for something like that. There are few reasons to choose that over a C++ physics library, not because Lua is slow, but simply because C++ is faster, and the libraries are typically much more mature and feature-rich.