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On 26 Sep 2006, at 13:18, Jason T. Slack wrote:
I stumbled upon Lua when reading about Adobe Lightroom.I write a text editor and backup software, under what circumstances would I want to use Lua in my applications? What does it do for me?
Lightroom is a classic example of a hybrid application. We are able to exploit the strengths of several languages. There are portions of the app that we would never write in Lua (our core image processing routines, for example), and other portions where the use of Lua saves us a tremendous amount of time in the development process.
In large part, our application consists of a fairly rich native code layer which exposes various platform services (OS, file system, user interface fundamentals) and Adobe native code libraries (camera raw processing, etc.) to Lua. Most of the core "business logic" of Lightroom is expressed in Lua. Among other things, this allows us to gloss over the fact that the native code may be radically different (i.e. most of our Windows UI layer is written in C++, but the Mac UI layer is written in Objective C, yet the layout is described only once ... in Lua).
Having used Lua for a few years now, I've been amazed at how quickly I can build up arbitrary data structures and defer processing ("do this task whenever the app is idle but only once", etc.). It makes us all much more nimble as a development team.
-Eric