Re: Proposal: smartlua

[mchalkley@...]

Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 10:12:40 AM, you wrote:

> 2013/3/6 Peter Drahoš <drahosp@gmail.com>:
>>
>> Please consider using lua-git[1] to download the files directly from git.

> The page referred to is an extreme but not untypical example of why Lua
> users can't get off the ground in collaborative library writing. There is no
> README, no thumbnail description, no doc subdirectory.

I have to say I found getting started with Lua very painful.  I've
been coding professionally since 1980, and became "comfortable"
programming in more languages than I can remember anymore (but I'm not
sure if that's more a testimony to the number of languages or to my
failing memory...).  While I found Lua a joy, I can't say the same for
the various deployment mechanisms out there.  I never did get LuaJit
to work (can't remember why now - in the end I just gave up and forced
myself to acknowledge that it was plenty fast for my uses without it).

While Lua is small and fast, I really, really wish there were a way to
easily deploy programs to target machines. I wrote a server monitoring
program that runs on 15 or so Windows servers and a couple Linux
machines, and I never was happy with the amount of stuff that I had to
copy to them. I never knew whether it was as lean as it could've been,
etc. I'll admit that I'm ridiculously picky about the size of
executables, given the size of hard drives these days, the memory
footprint, given the amount of memory available these days, and the
efficiency of the software, given the amount of processor power
available these days. But, if I weren't all of those things, I
probably wouldn't have ever found Lua, and that would've been a shame.
And I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that it doesn't all
pile on - in other words, if nobody worries about any of that stuff,
it's the consumer who ends up worrying about it. But hey, that's no
problem, just go buy another machine, right?

I'll also admit that I have a strong reluctance to complain about free
software, and to abuse free support. So, as a result, I often suffer
in silence for extended periods of time, both when it comes to the
quality the software and stupid mistakes I make when coding (yes,
Steve, it's true, even though you did catch me using the reserved word
"type" as a variable name once :) ).

Anyway, all that having been said, the concept of SmartLua really
appeals to me, especially if it made dependency checking, bundling of
modules, etc. easier, leaner and meaner. What I'd really love to see
is a way of creating a package that would contain only the modules
needed in a zipped file, along with the scripts involved, and,
separately, the necessary parts of the Lua interpreter. On Windows, I
could just create a shortcut to lua.exe (or luajit.exe) that passed it
the name of the script that I wanted executed and it would pull
everything it needed from the zip file. And that's it - two files, no
matter how many programs I deployed to that machine, not counting a
shortcut for each program, of course... Ideally, I'd also like it to
support some form of encryption of the zip file, not because I think
my code is so special, but to prevent it from being monkeyed with
without my knowledge. Does any of this make any sense, or am I just
out of my mind?

Mark