I am planning on building a Lua scripting engine into my iOS game engine to allow AI designers to control the game's AI. The game engine is written in Swift and SpriteKit and targets iOS on iPhone and iPad.
I have been reading lots of conflicting information online about whether Apple allows the execution of Lua scripts inside an iOS app. Does anyone know whether Apple allows this, as of 2022? I have found some answers online, including on StackOverflow, but some sources claim Apple allows this capability, and some say Apple does not.
There seems to be some distinction between downloading and executing scripting code, vs just executing the scripting code. I am Ok with bundling the Lua scripts into the packaged iOS bundle. I'd like to be able to dynamically download the Lua scripts, but it is not a requirement.
Note that I am able to include a copy of the Lua code in my Xcode project, included a bridging header with some Objective-C wrapper files, and can successfully call and execute Lua functions from Swift code, and vice versa. So technically this technique is possible, my question concerns whether Apple allows this.
In addition, in searching for an answer to this question, it appears that very few iOS games support modding. I was only able to find 2 or 3 games in which players claimed it was possible to write a mod for the iOS version of the game, but for even those, it was a little unclear whether the games actually allowed the mod on the mobile version. Mindustry was the only game that I could find in which you could install a mod on iOS. It is unclear to me whether the lack of modding support on iOS was due to Apple not allowing iOS apps to execute scripting code, which would effectively eliminate most games' modding capability, or whether the lack of modding on iOS was just because it's mostly PC gamers who write mods for their games. Mobile gamers just don't get into modding. So if anyone knows of any iOS games that support modding, especially via Lua scripts, could you post the name of the game?