That's assuming your assumption is correct.
I really did not expect a serious response. Would it be a stretch to rewrite Blockland in C, or somehow port Torque to C? Can TorqueScript be modified by Eric?
Porting something from C++ to C is slighly counterproductive because C is just C++ with most of the features removed. There's not really a notable speed difference between the two (both are considered "ultrafast") but there are still reasons to backport:
Modifying Tork (as we tend to both affectionately and furiously refer to it) is possible but there's not really much reason to do so unless you intend to do
a lot of work. If you're asking about binding additional functions to let us do more with the engine (for example, selective ghosting) that's not really modifying the language. Though I will point out that I have the source code for the version of Tork blockland was built in and
a stupid amount of useful engine features have not been bound to the scripting engine, making them unusable in add-ons. These include environmental sound, most of the drawing system, etc.
Tork is mainly slow because of its habit of performing far too many unnecessary string conversions, and these are necessary because of how the language is designed. (i.e. badly)
Tork's object system relies on every scriptable object being in a massive lookup table. Everything not only has an ID, but can be renamed too and accessed through that name. Things can have things inside them, and there's no optimization for that. The closest thing we have to a null variable is literally "". Tork masquerades as a freely typed language with no way to get or cast between types, and that's because
everything is a string.
This string based design sticks out even more when you realise that Tork's solution to passing vectors to, around and from its scripting engine is
still (see the GarageGames repository for Torque3D) the word, field and line system - i.e. converting things to strings, converting those individual strings to numbers to modify them, converting them back, passing them back to the engine, converting them back to individual numbers, converting those three back to a vector.
This is why torque has individual string ($=, SPC, @ etc) and number (==) operators, why everything has a numerical and string value, and why, above all, the engine feels so damn slow when you try to make something without doing anything with C++. The engine is not bad. The scripting system very much is.
I'm serious.
Here's a github issue where the first reply is one of the GarageGames devs recommending the user just ditch Tork's terrible scripting engine.
