Re: Interest in Lua Web Plug-in?

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

<snip> Lots of interesting stuff deleted.

On 7-Mar-07, at 8:24 PM, David Given wrote:

> As an off-the-top-of-my-head example... Javascript and Lua are very 
> similar,
> right? But Lua's far smaller and faster. Could you make a fast 
> Javascript
> interpreter by translating it into Lua? This makes you suddenly very 
> desirable
> in both the Javascript and Actionscript worlds, and you can use that to
> leverage Lua (since everyone hates Javascript, and your engine gives 
> you Lua
> for free, and raw Lua will be faster than even your high-speed 
> Javascript...).
> Suddenly, your enemies will be fighting *for* you, rather than against 
> you.

Maybe. One of the things that makes Lua faster is its semantics,
though. You could implement Javascript semantics in Lua (such
as table-like access to locals, or closure frames that include
all variables, not just lexically-named ones) but I suspect
the result would be even slower than Javascript.

Still, it's possible: maybe you can make a "sometimes fast"
Javascript interpreter which doesn't penalize you for slow
features, if it could somehow intuit when you weren't using
them...