Modernizing FlightGear Scripting

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Background

FlightGear has built-in scripting capabilities using a custom ECMAScript-based C-like language called Nasal. Over the last couple of years, we've seen some recurring debates in response to requests to provide support for additional scripting languages, possibly to replace Nasal scripting in its entirety.

Motivation

Nasal is de-facto unmaintained and has been unmaintained for several years meanwhile, Nasal is a niche language that is really only used by the FlightGear project, long-standing issues such as its garbage collector, which isn't suitable for a semi-realtime application/simulation like FlightGear, haven't been fixed in years.

In general, there are other, much better maintained, options for embedded scripting these days, such as e.g.:

• Lua
• Python
• Perl

In addition, documentation and end-user support for more established/mainstream languages is obviously much better than anything we have for the custom FlightGear/Nasal interpreter.

Many people argue that a more standard scripting language (like e.g. Python) would also attract more potential contributors to FlightGear, also the sizable community with 3rd party modules, means that new functionality can be much more easily implemented ("batteries included", and "no yak shaving" needed).

References

References