Comments on: Adventures with Corona, Part 2: Where Corona Needs Improvement

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 23:09:57 +0000

Thanks. I don’t use Corona anymore, but that’s good to know. Similarly, Adobe AIR has also added the ability to run native code.

By: Shan

Shan — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:53:42 +0000

FYI: Corona Enterprise supports native code…

By: Nurturing and maintaining a relationship with a big corporation while choosing the best paths for your own needs and interests « Josh Talks Flash

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 06:48:51 +0000

[…] and I took advantage of that time to really kick the tires. It resulted in several blog posts that compared and contrasted the capabilities of Corona and AIR. A couple of the posts were in favor of AIR while a couple were […]

By: T

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:04:58 +0000

Great write-up, and you cover a few things I mentioned in a similar post highlighting some gripes with Corona SDK. Also, like you I really enjoy porting apps to Corona, and have a hard time seeing any cons with learning how to use Corona (and by proxy, Lua). AS3 and Lua are infinitely easier to use (and learn) than Obj-C, or any other solutions I've come across for targeting both Android and iOS. Looking forward to reading your thoughts on the improvements that came with AIR 3 announced yesterday at Adobe MAX. I already found that the performance increase was very substantial.

By: Where Corona SDK Falls (kinda) Flat | Producerism

Where Corona SDK Falls (kinda) Flat | Producerism — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:59:53 +0000

[…] matter-of-factly, so if any of these gripes are unwarranted, please let me know in the comments. Here is another good blog post from a Flash/Corona developer which covers some of the same issues brought up in my […]

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:15:45 +0000

Good question, Sam. Simple answer: I don’t like Objective-C. It wasn’t a difficult language to learn, but I simply wasn’t having fun using it. It’s been ages since I had to manage my own memory, and while my skills are still there from when I worked with C++ years ago, it felt like a giant leap backwards. Combine that with the ugly syntax, and I didn’t even finish a single game. Bottom line, if I don’t enjoy my work as a game developer, that’s the exact opposite of my primary goal from when I decided to take some time off from a real job to try it out.

Give me a super flexible language like Lua or JavaScript (or ActionScript), with a garbage collector, and I’m on my way to expressing myself and enjoying it. If I can have more fun playing with the language sometimes, then that’s a language I want to use, even if it isn’t quite as fast as native code. I’ll even work around missing features that I would have access to if I chose native instead.

Thankfully, AIR now has native extensions. I only need to write a little bit of native code (or maybe I’ll be able to find extensions that other developers have already created) and then I can use anything from ActionScript. Hopefully, Corona will let me do the same someday.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:24:21 +0000

Hi Josh, I’ve been reading your posts and they are very entertaining, but the question keeps arising in the back of my head: Why are you going to all this trouble dealing with all these high level abstractions like Corona and AIR when Cocos 2D for the iPhone is pure Objective C with an API built to suit Flash devs? Along with This you have access to all facets of functionality, because it’s native Objective C written in XCode.

By: Walter

Walter — Wed, 18 May 2011 08:05:34 +0000

@Josh, enjoyed your 2-part blog post on Corona!

In response to basic functions in the standard library, I did whip up some implementations that I’ll be folding into the Corona core. The github gists’s are here:

http://bottledwalter.org/a-couple-of-must-have-javascript-functions-in

Feedback on improvements welcome.

They should be available in our daily builds by the end of the week.

walter

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Tue, 17 May 2011 20:03:39 +0000

Yeah, Lua isn’t very opinionated about OOP, but it has the capabilities. A smart developer could provide a pretty awesome library for OOP (based on meta-tables, or whatever) that would be very beneficial to Corona and other Lua environments. I know there’s a “class” library out there, but I’m thinking something with more capabilities.

Personally, I had no problem creating class-like units of code in separate Lua files. Honestly, following best practices I learned in AS3, and porting over some libraries like signals, I felt like Lua was just as capable as AS3 for building games, without turning my code into spaghetti. Languages like Lua and JavaScript make it easier to be messy, unfortunately, but they also give freedom that isn’t available in stricter languages, and I really like the balance.

By: Flexwiz

Flexwiz — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:48:46 +0000

” I get the impression that most people throw the Lua interpreter into their C++ games and write super short scripts that don’t need much supporting utility code. Anything complex just goes in the C++ layer. ”

How very true – I used LUA for years for C++ based games and as an scripting addon its great. However scripts are not real code, and I would not dream of writing an entire project in LUA – its just not designed for that purpose.

Many have tried, and ended up with terrible spaghetti code since there are hardly any OOP features. Sure, Corona is awesome for small games, but anything with over 200 lines of code belongs with a more suitable language (AS3, ObjectiveC, take your pick).