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Comment by subhero | Hacker News Reader

I always do not understand why defold is never put into the fold [sic!] of those sentiments/discussions. You can learn a clean & fun language (lua) and its JIT is maybe/probably running laps around something like GDScript, which in itself is proprietary and has no other uses for you than, ehh, Godot?? You can integrate C/C++ extensions natively, neatly exposing them through lua APIs. Its mobile and web target footprint is unbeatably (?) small, desktop at least 10x smaller than Godot or Unity. It is Open Source.

Maybe it's the "ancient" part, because more recent is always better ;)

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> I always do not understand why defold

Starting with absolutely nothing but a compiler is always going to be a worse experience (and less likely to result in anything released) than a GUI-driven and aided solution. If Defold developers had produced a fraction of the libraries that Godot has, it might have had a chance. As of now, it's worse than other abandoned engines like Solar2D (was CoronaSDK) for people entering the space. As most people know, the vast majority of games are net-losses, so engines live and die by the ease of adoption by newcomers.

> Starting with absolutely nothing but a compiler

I don't understand what you mean by this -- Defold has a graphical editor?

> If Defold developers had produced a fraction of the libraries that Godot has, it might have had a chance.

What do you mean by libraries in this context? It has a robust plugin system with a reasonably active ecosystem, if that's the sort of thing you're talking about: https://defold.com/assets/

And it covers all the systems one would expect in a 2D game engine natively -- tilemaps, physics etc.

> As of now, it's worse than other abandoned engines like Solar2D (was CoronaSDK) for people entering the space.

I definitely disagree with this -- it's certainly not abandoned, and though it does have a slightly steeper learning curve than Godot or other popular engines, that's also how it gets such impressive performance and slim builds; feature, not a bug.

Unfortunately, I'm really not a fan of using Lua for anything beyond simple scripting.

Good news, they've been working on adding C# support for a year or two now. I think it's still experimental, but from what I understand they already had a robust extension system that supported C/C++/Java/etc., so fitting C# in wasn't much of a stretch.

(it is only extension support -- not scripting -- but the extension system is such that it can be used for any game logic AFAIK)

defold is really cool, the only downside is its really weird build system for native extensions

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