Re: CMake and Lua

["Thiago Bastos" <tabastos@...>]

Yes, I agree with those points, and I'm glad to hear that you are considering Lua.
I was just trying to motivate you to work towards a more Lua-ish design :-)

If integrating Lua in CMake really happens, I'll probably take a look at it.

Regards,
Thiago

2008/2/12, Ken Martin <ken.martin@kitware.com>:

> Exactly. I believe it doesn't make much sense to simply create Lua
> bindings to CMake's current set of functions, as they are currently
> designed. You wouldn't be exploring Lua's full potential.

Well from my perspective there are some advantages to using Lua even if it
is not a Lua centric design. Specifically

1) it provides a documented, tested, and popular language where people know
the corner cases on odd escaping sequences, etc.

2) it provides some data structures (tables maps) and program structures
(functions closures etc) that are nicely developed.

3) It provides a scripting language for configure/build time custom scripts
that is more well known/supported. i.e. if you have CMake then you would
have a Lua interpreter as well so you can use Lua scripts in your configure
or build process to perform some odd tasks here and there.

None of these benefits are that important for small or medium sized
projects. But when you get to large and complex projects they become more
significant.

The data structures for targets etc would still be in CMake land (aka
optimized profiled C++ code), not Lua structures, so you are right it would
not be a real Lua centric approach. But a move to Lua as the driving
language might still have value IMO.

Thanks
Ken