ABSTRACT
Scripting languages have always been a foundation of rapid artificial intelligence (AI) development but with the increasing demands of AI, their performance drawbacks are becoming ever more problematic. On the other hand, traditional C++ development approaches generally lead to lengthy compile and link times, which limit the amount of iteration and testing that programmers can undertake. A variety of alternative approaches can be used to achieve fast iteration times in games, each with their own pros and cons. Overall we believe that none offer the main benefits of Runtime Compiled C++, and many techniques can be enhanced by using RCC++ alongside them. Scripting languages provide perhaps the most common solution to achieving fast iteration. A games engine survey showed Lua to be the foremost scripting language in game development, though UnrealScript likely represents a substantial proportion of the market, given the size of the Unreal Engine community.
