Re: risks of lua fork?

[Enrico Tassi <gareuselesinge@...>]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 11:18:23AM +0100, Grellier, Thierry wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> How the risk of a Lua fork increases with the community size, given the
> slow release pace and even slower features introduction pace?

I believe that forking a good project is a stupid idea. The key points
of lua are clear and I like that our "benevolent dictator" is stick to
them.

The only thing I'd like to see is some sort of cooperation in the
production of libraries. AFAIK there are multiple implementation of the
same libraries (we have 3 different curl bindings for example) and 
some really important libraries (like posix) seem not to be well
maintained. This coordination effort has to be made by the community, if
we failed so far it not a lua fault.

> These are not all core features.
> - support for Unicode 

I've never understood what Unicode support really means...

> - richer pattern matching

Lpeg and pcre are there to fix the second issue. The latter is not in
the core for a good reason (size), the former may be in the future...

> - just in time compilation

Luajit, even if it lacks amd64 support, seem to be there...

> - bitwise operators (this is a core feature, not a library feature: just
> try to imagine using arithmetic operators as a library)

What you may want is the possibility of defining a new syntax that
interprets a | b and bit.or(a,b)... metalua is there. All non necessary
stuff should stay away from the core, that is a key point of lua I
think.

Having a good and sane library to do stuff has to be provided by the
community... having a simple way to use that stuff is a task for
distributions (debian, fink, luarocks...), including everithing in the
core goes against one key point of lua (or maybe two: small and simple).

Cheers.
-- 
Enrico Tassi