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Comment by pietroglyph | Hacker News Reader

Godot has consistently impressed me. I tried something with it a year ago, but I got stalled because the only supported language (then) was a custom language called GDScript. Support for C# was added in October [0], and there are a bunch of other exciting changes in 3.0 [1] that have happened. I can't wait to give Godot another try. (If anyone is wondering how all this development is funded, Godot appears to get a lot of funding on Patreon, and the C# support was funded by Microsoft.)

[0]: https://godotengine.org/article/introducing-csharp-godot

[1]: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-0-released

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I tried C# in 3.0.2 and sadly it's not yet feature complete, which meant porting my GDscript was not possible, but I love what's in place right now and I can't wait for it to become more mature. On the other hand, GDscript itself has gotten a lot better, and it's getting types in 3.1!

Technically speaking though, thanks to their C APIs (GDNative) you can use any language now, I've seen bindings for D, Rust, Go, Haskell and a bunch others!

GDScript really is just a subset of Python and works really well. Remember Moonscript for Unity? Well GDScript is much better.

GoDot FAQ:

The short answer is, we'd rather a programmer does the small effort to learn GDScript so he or she later has a seamless experience, than attracting him or her with a familiar programming language that results in a worse experience. We are OK if you would rather not give Godot a chance because of this, but we strongly encourage you to try it and see the benefits yourself.

The official [languages] for Godot are GDScript and C++.

GDScript is designed to integrate from the ground to the way Godot works, more than any other language, and is very simple and easy to learn. Takes at much a day or two to get comfortable and it's very easy to see the benefits once you do. Please do the effort to learn GDScript, you will not regret it.

Godot C++ API is also efficient and easy to use (the entire Godot editor is made with this API), and an excellent tool to optimize parts of a project, but trying to use it instead of GDScript for an entire game is, in most cases, a waste of time.

>The short answer is, we'd rather a programmer does the small effort to learn GDScript so he or she later has a seamless experience, than attracting him or her with a familiar programming language that results in a worse experience.

The implication here being that all other programming languages used in game development are bound to be worse than GDScript?

I'm learning Godot and while I'm not an expert at either yet, by any means, GDScript has yet to live up to that degree of hype for me. The only advantage it has over other languages is its status as the default for the engine, but I don't see it as an objectively better language than, say, C, C++, C# or Lua.

I think they mean that GDScript is the best language for Godot. And at that time of writing it was, they tried several scripting languages(Lua, Python, Squirrel iirc) and none gave the 'seamless experience' that GDScript. Hell even the C# support at the beginning of Godot 3.0 was wonky.

But they listened to the community and added support for adding your own scripting language and Mono support. Which is still a big positive.

I got caught up on that a few times too but GDScript is actually pretty good. I actually enjoy using that more than C#. Great during the quick prototyping phase at least.

Note now it supports just about anything thanks to GDNative and related efforts. Including support for D, Rust and other languages (I only cared to look those two up but if those are supported I can only imagine what else is). Also people can make plugins that extend the editor altogether. Its amazing that without C# the installer is a tiny download. You download other game engines and you're in for 1GB+.

At first I didn’t want to try it but GDscript is actually not bad. I think they have some new features planned for it too like type annotations

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