<p>I am trying to build out a useful 3d game engine out of the Ogre3d rendering engine for mocking up some of the ideas i have come up with and have come to a bit of a crossroads. There are a number of scripting languages that are available and i was wondering if there were one or two that were vetted and had a proper following. </p>

<p>LUA and Squirrel seem to be the more vetted, but im open to any and all. </p>

<p>Optimally it would be best if there were a compiled form for the language for distribution and ease of loading.</p>

I'd go with Lua since writing bindings is extremely easy, the license is very friendly (MIT) and existing libraries also tend to be under said license. Scheme is also nice and easy to bind which is why it was chosen for the Gimp image editor for example. But Lua is simply great. World of Warcraft uses it, as a very high profile example. LuaJIT gives you native-compiled performance. It's
less than an order of magnitude
from pure C.