Lua Observations/Questions

[Ken Rawlings <krawling@...>]

Hi,

  Congratulations to the Lua developers for creating an amazing piece
  of technology. I recently discovered Lua and am constantly amazed at
  how elegant, small, and usable it is.

  I've been trying to port the basic Lua library to Windows CE and have
  run into several problems(most related to the amazing fact that 
  the Windows CE C compiler doesn't have stdio.h). Also, while working
  with the Lua source, i've noticed several things. If you have a moment,
  i'd be curious to know what the general opinion is on these issues:

  * The basic library does file i/o in order to execute lua scripts
    from disk. It seems like iolib would be a more natural place for
    for this code, for portability issues.

  * The basic library uses "printf", which has no meaning on systems
    without a console. Would it be possible instead to perhaps have 
    the host register a callback function that gets called for textual
    output?

  * Lua doesn't appear to have any knowledge of Unicode strings, since
    all strings are manipulated as "char *". Are there plans to make Lua
    Unicode-aware?

  * Is it safe to have a Lua function(called from lua_dostring()) call a C
    function, which then calls lua_dostring() itself?

  * Can multiple instances of the Lua interpreter be used inside one
    process? The presence of one lua_state("L") shared globally is
    worrisome -- can it be shared by multiple interpreters?

  * Is it possible to do binary I/O in Lua? The iolib seems to be
    text-file specific.

  * Lua does not appear to be properly tail-recursive, which makes
    me hesitate to write any algorithms recursively. Is this something
    that is important to anyone else?

  * I've been working with Java for a few years, so i've become
    wary of the "stutter" normally associated with Garbage Collection.
    Does Lua's GC have this problem when applications become large?

Thanks,
Ken Rawlings (krawling@bluemarble.net)