Is Love relatively stable?

[omariisan]

Forgive my ignorance, I don't know much about Love yet. I've poked around the documentation and written some basic stuff in it, nothing particularly interesting. I'm considering starting a more serious project, but I'm a bit apprehensive about writing it for Love. My apprehension stems largely from the version number... 0.9.x. I'm wondering if there are significant changes in store for Love that will break compatibility as the framework evolves. That is, I am worried that code I write today might need to be written in six month because of changes in how Love works.

Should I wait until Love matures a bit, while playing in another language? Or should I not worry much about it and start writing something in Love?

[jjmafiae]

Löve and releases:

löve gets a new release (x.x.0, minor bug fix releases gets released when needed and generally don't break much) every 11-14 months or so and the changes are mostly too minor to make it hard to port to the new version, it only took me 30 minutes or so to upgrade on of my previous projects to 0.9.0 from 0.8.0

Löve's stability:

Löve is really stable and it's pretty fast too if your game is optimized right, my big 2D shooter which im working and has not been released yet and runs at 60 FPS 98.5% of the time (vsync on), there isn't really many bugs, 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 fixed most of the ones that were around.

Conclusion: Go for it, if you are comfy with lua and like the löve API there is no reason not to do it.

[T-Bone]

Löve is stable in that it works well and rarely crashes. The API however is not stable yet, it changes with every release. It means that if you code a game for Löve 0.9.1 (the current version), you will need to change some things in order to support Löve 0.10.0 (or whatever the next version will be called).

I started Hat Cat back in the days of Löve 0.7.2. When 0.8.0 came around, I hade to change a few things, and the same when 0.9.0 came. It still runs on 0.7.2 though Fixing compatability between Löve versions isn't that bad though, it's mostly just functions getting new names (rather than new behaviour) so it's just a few lines to fix.

[Jasoco]

I started with 0.6. The changes to 0.7 were huge and required a lot of code changes. But they were worth it in the end. There weren't as many changes with 0.8 and 0.9 relatively but there's always changes. Löve's API won't be fully stable until 1.0 comes, which won't be for a long time. It's always changing.

If you have an idea for a game now, make the game now. When the time comes, there are people who can help fix the code if you need it.