I'd like to make a content pipeline for some of my games/engines/etc I'm working on, and I'm not quite sure what would be the best language to use. I'm using C++ for the actual runtime, but this seems very unproductive for tools. I've seen C# recommended several times for Windows-only content pipelines, but I'd like to know if there's anything more cross-platform.

Here are some features that an ideal language would provide:

• It also should provide some abstraction of OS-specific functionality such as directory iteration, etc. It should also be easy to use high-level features such as regular expressions and other text-manipulation techniques.
• Integrating this language with Lua should be simple, as I want to use Lua as a data-description language for several resource types.
• Calling external processes shouldn't be too hard -- for example, I might want to use the Cg toolkit's cgc program to compile shaders.

I suppose C++ could work if I used heaps of boost libraries -- this does seem a bit cumbersome though, and I imagine it would cause a large hit on compile times.

Anyone have any suggestions for a good language to use?

If you're just making offline tools and load time doesn't matter use Java or C#. If youre going to be using it in game, suck it up and C++ your way trough it.

Thanks for the responses!

If you're just making offline tools and load time doesn't matter use Java or C#. If youre going to be using it in game, suck it up and C++ your way trough it.

Yes, I'm just making offline tools, so as you say, load time isn't too important. I don't like Java much, but I'm interested in the possibility of using C# as a cross-platform language.

Out of raw curiosity, why do you need cross-platform tools?

Mostly because I don't have a PC. Also I just think it's theoretically a bit nicer.

I use C# for that -- the huge standard library does all your directory/text/regex stuff, LuaInterface makes integrating with Lua amazingly simple (I use Lua to describe a lot of my input data), and calling external compilers, etc is easy.

Wow, that stuff looks great; I'm quite intrigued by the idea of using C# now.

However Mono does make it portable if you need that, and the Mono/.NET runtime dependency doesnt bother me because only my devs need it, not my players/customers.

Okay, I'll look into Mono.

Yes, what I meant is that I use a Mac. I'm not sure what you mean by your first sentence; are you saying that I could use a Mac-specific programming language?

I had heard of Mono, but I wasn't sure how practical it was, so thanks for the input. From what you've said, using C# with Mono sounds like a good choice then.

EDIT: My line of reasoning for wanting to make it cross-platform was that most people seem to make their tools Windows-only, so if I need to support another platform, it's probably better to support Windows as well.