03-30-2014, 07:45 AM
Actually Lua has many good libraries, but installing them is not trivial enough for most people. Have a look at LuaRocks, the amount of libraries available there is impressive. And there are more repositories like this, LuaDist being one of them if I remember correctly.
I believe Lua was chosen because it's rather easy to integrate, is fast and is both simple to learn for beginners and powerful enough for advanced stuff. Also it is a somewhat standard scripting language for game engines nowadays.
C++ is not a good language for plugins because it requires compilation, which means every plugin would either be a platform-dependent binary file, or a source distribution which the users would have compile for themselves. Not so great stuff for casual users.
I believe Lua was chosen because it's rather easy to integrate, is fast and is both simple to learn for beginners and powerful enough for advanced stuff. Also it is a somewhat standard scripting language for game engines nowadays.
C++ is not a good language for plugins because it requires compilation, which means every plugin would either be a platform-dependent binary file, or a source distribution which the users would have compile for themselves. Not so great stuff for casual users.