Re: Lua 5.0 and tolua/SWIG ?

[Juergen Fuhrmann <fuhrmann@...>]

>  Tue, 3 Sep 2002 09:31:33 +0100 (BST)
>  Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> wrote:
>
>  > Is there any intention to use the newer versions of SWIG (1.3+ ) for
>  > that ?  I tried luaswig, and decided to prefer tolua for the time being
>  > as I found no canonical way to specify garbage collection tag methods
>  > and such in a more or less obvious fashion. My impression was that the
>  > last stable SWIG version was not ripe enough to do a clean job, and SWIG
>  > evolved quite a lot since than.
>  
>  Why are you interested in using SWIG? I use it because it's better than 
>  tolua at understanding esoteric C constructs, but if I had the choice I'd 
>  rather use tolua.

SWIG would contain the option to use other extension languages or JAVA
at the  same time. However,  in order to  realize it, quite  some work
still would be necessary to invest. 

Basically  I would  not think  about it  if we  would have  some lean,
consistent option  for an  UI toolkit working  together with  Lua. For
myself, I see two options:

a) Lua-FLTK of Jay Carlson but the currend binding needs the so-called
property patch to  tolua -- we would need to carry  over this patch to
5.0.  IMHO, unless wxwindows and IUP,  FLTK is very much in the spirit
of Lua: lean, fast, portable.

b) LuaJava  of Carlos Cassino  with JAVA Swing  classes.  As far  as I
understand, it did  not make it to Lua4.0.   The obvious advantage for
us is  that we can  find lots of  students etc. speaking Java  for GUI
jobs.

I very much would like to invest two weeks or so in order to get a) to
work, for b)  I feel not qualified enough. But I  am charged with lots
of other stuff and cannot allow this to myself...

In  the bottomline:  I  think lua  needs  a canonical  option for  GUI
building, and some  concentration of forces on that.  So that everyone
who asks  what to  use can be  told: Unless  your demands are  not too
exotic, use ... for your GUI.



Juergen