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Enrico Tassi wrote:
[...]
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.

There's currently no real distinction being made between Lua the language and Lua the platform. As the maintainers are only really concerned with the former, the latter hasn't seen much work, as you'd expect... there are projects like LuaX or LuaBinaries, but they've never achieved critical mass.

Another thing that's worth considering is that due to the nature of Lua, standard distributions are of limited worth. The thing is that as soon as you start patching the language, precompiled addons become worthless. I've just added the LNUM patch to WordGrinder, in an attempt to improve performance. This means that I can no longer use Debian's standard Lua, or Debian's standard LuaFileSystem package, and have to start distributing, compiling and maintaining my own copies of the language. (The binary size has shot up from 16kB to a staggeringly huge 130kB. How will we ever cope?)

[...]
- 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.

Actually, there's a patch that does this:

http://lua-users.org/files/wiki_insecure/power_patches/5.1/newluaoperators.patch

--
David Given
dg@cowlark.com