Re: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 08:59:43PM -0300, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> "We heavily modified the Lua interpreter to support many advanced
> features. The first thing we did was to change the syntax to be almost
> identical to C/C++ since the BASIC-like coding style was irksome, and to
> add in sorely missed operators such as +=, *=, ++, etc. "
> 
> If they wanted Javascript they knew where to find it, right? :-(

I've considered adding those operators a couple times, since
"IndexVariable = IndexVariable + 1" is just tiring.  I'm not quick
to suggest adding operators, but these ones really are complete
no-brainers.  (I havn't yet added them to my tree, due to the cost
of maintaining more forked code and the learning curve imposed by
adding bits to Lua that aren't the Lua that everyone else knows.)

Cosmetically changing the syntax to be more C-like is just gratuitous,
though.

> "Furthermore, we made a series of incredible performance enhancements to
> the execution speed and memory management of the interpreter. We greatly
> decreased table access times and improved the performance of the garbage
> collector."
> 
> Now, it would be interesting to know details about this.

It's always frustrating to me when people say "we took this open source
code and made it better", without any mention of contributing it back.

(Not a suggestion of copyleft or anything like that--my frustration is
how it seems to never even cross their mind.  Copyleft bends arms, but
doesn't create motivation.)

Sure would be nice to see that Lua debugger under the MIT license, too.
It's easy enough to have simple Lua debugging facilities *inside* a game
engine, but it's not so obvious how to do it in a real debugger, stepping
through code inside an embedded Lua state.

> "Lua was a constant source of extreme anger and frustration."
> 
> :-(
> 
> "The Lua debugger was highly experimental and didn't become stable until
> several months before launch."
> 
> So, why blame it on Lua??

"Lua was a constant target of misdirected anger and frustration."

-- 
Glenn Maynard