RE: Unique directions for Lua?

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

> Sometimes I get the feeling that some people want to take Lua into
> directions that would make it less suitable for my embedded work.

Like me, with standard Lua libraries and big distributions? I try to be
careful to make a distinction between core Lua (which I'd like to see stay
small and portable) and what one might term Lua distributions (which I'd
like to see build out of the box with rich functionality on a wide range
of systems, and come with a large range of Lua and C libraries).

These goals are not opposed, it's just that most single-implementation
languages are also single-distribution.

Note that I've never advocated making the language itself (much) bigger
and certainly not slower in the common case.

Having Lua working better on embedded systems would be great.

> I'd like to see the Lua compiler implemented in... Lua.

Interesting, as I would too, but for rather different reasons: to make it
easier to change the language.

> I guess this gets into a bootstrap issue of how would you build the Lua
> compiler without an existing Lua compiler.  My brain hurts.

How is this different from "how would you build the C compiler without an
existing C compiler"? Anyway, we *have* an existing Lua compiler.

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur (Anon)