Some time ago, I announced that the Molecule Engine uses C++ as a scripting language. Today, I can share implementation details and a few additional tricks that were used to keep compilation times and executable sizes down.
Serialization, reflection, and other mechanisms are often used for saving data in an editor or a tool like the asset pipeline, and then loading that data into the engine at run-time. This process is well-known, flexible, and allows us to store the data in any format conceivable. Still, all those techniques show certain weaknesses when it comes to keeping iteration times to an absolute minimum.
Even though Molecule’s run-time engine exclusively uses binary files without doing any parsing, the asset pipeline uses a human-readable non-binary format for storing pretty much everything except raw asset files like textures or models. This post explains the process behind translating data from such a human-readable format into actual instances of C++ structs with very little setup code required.
Molecular Musings 