Re: Unique directions for Lua?

[David <dcuny@...>]

>From the perspective of a Clueless Newbie, my goal is to be able to download 
Lua and be able to use it as a "general-purpose, stand-alone language." I can 
do that with the 'core' Lua - the binary is available for Linux and Windows, 
and it runs great.

The situation is less good when dealing with other libraries. I'll pick on 
glLua only because it's the one I tried. It had makefiles for Windows, but 
only the MSVC compiler, which didn't work with my Borland compiler. I 
struggled with it for a couple days, and then threw up my hands.

So for the Clueless Newbie, compiling represents a perhaps insumountable 
hurdle. Even if they are using Linux, that's no guarantee that they have the 
slightest idea what 

  ./configure
  make

means. So, assuming that you didn't want to lose the Clueless Newbies (a big 
assumption, I know), how could this hurdle be removed?

At a minimum, libraries could be supplied with compiled versions. This would 
greatly lower the hurdle. But what if I wanted to use glLua with curlLua?

Creating these libraries as linkable libraries would be even nicer, since I 
could (in theory) pick and choose the libraries that I wanted to use. On the 
other hand, who's going to maintain this library? (Don't look at me!)

Another option would be to create a bloated, version of Lua with enough 
features to make Clueless Newbies reasonably happy: OpenGL, GLUT, BSD style 
sockets, OpenAL, stdio.h... 

Nah, that would never happen: 

    http://www.yindo.com/docs/Introduction.html

-- David Cuny