Re: On lua5 and embedding

[Dirk Zoller <duz@...>]

Hello list,

first I must apologize that I entirely missed the alpha and most of the
beta phase of Lua-5 being so happy with Lua-4.

> It worries me that some people seem to have a negative impression of Lua 5
> so near to it being officially released. Someone even said that we have
> "seriously damaged Lua functionality"! Sure, Lua 5 is different from Lua 4.
> The metamethod scheme is not the same as the tagmethod scheme, but it is
> simpler and more flexible, even if sometimes you have to use proxy tables
> for doing some stuff that was easy in Lua 4. Lua 5 was the outcome of a long
> sequence of work versions of Lua 4.1 and has gone through alpha and now beta
> stages. I'd think major design flaws would be found by now :-(
> --lhf

My impression is that if you can change something for the better then you
do it. Whatever it costs. I like this. Although for example the massive
changes in Lua's C-API from version 3.2 to 4.0 meant a lot of work for me.
(It is clearly better now, but please don't do this again.)

Now I'm a little concerned hearing about massive changes to userdata and tag
methods, both concepts we use a lot. I will continue with Lua-4 until I have
a week or so of time to tackle the changes needed for Lua-5.

This my statement is of no technical value whatsoever. All I want to say is
keep up the good work but don't be surprised if your users don't follow the
pace.

Dirk