NerveBreak is a C-like scripting language by Bad Sector. It is available for free, as long as credits are given and bug corrections/code improvements are returned. Read the included license for more information. I made NerveBreak because i needed a scripting library that is small and has a C-like structure. Also i needed to have full control on the source code (so GPLd libraries are out of the scheme). Some people asked me why i didn't used Lua, since it lets you have full control on the source code and is very small. Well, there are two reasons that Lua doesn't suit my needs: first it's syntax seems ok, but for me looks like a mess :-). It's a personal matter, i think. Second, Lua does interpreting and type checking all the time. I've downloaded LuaCheia, a Lua interpreter for Windows and it contains a small asteroids game which uses a SDL module. The author says that this small game needs at least a 1Ghz machine in order to run smoothly. But i want a fast scripting language :-). Lua is good for what it does, but again even if I have an Athlon64 3200+ machine and i can run all Lua scripts fast, that doesn't mean that everyone has a such machine. For years i had old machines and i'm expecting to work with my athlon for at least two or three years. I can imagine how outdated this machine will be after three years, so i can understand those who right now cannot run some programs because they have 400, 500 or 600MHz machines (personally, two months ago i had a 300MHz PII machine).

So, i made NerveBreak, which has a C-like syntax and a fast virtual machine. From my experience with virtual machine based scripting languages, i can say that NerveBreak is pretty fast even on a PMMX 200MHz machine, where i'm expecting from it to execute more than 20000 commands per second.

(note: the abone may sound like an anti-Lua propaganda. However, it isn't. I've seen some very interesting usages of Lua -f.e. it had been used as the scripting 'heart' for a handheld device game- and i believe that for that what it does, it's one of the best options, since it's highly portable and very small - it just lacks the speed of an engine that compiles the source code to virtual machine bytecode).