Lua's great (and LuaJIT's broken)

["Sebastien Loisel" <loisel@...>]

Hello moon-people!

This is just a quick post to say that Lua's great. I would love to start using Lua for all my work (I'm a numerical analyst). What's amazing is that you can pretty much program your own semantics, and that's what I love. Obviously equally important for my needs, Lua is (kinda) fast.

Let me be a bit presumptuous by telling you what I would need to use Lua for all my work.

1) A "batteries included" distribution that includes an IDE, libraries such as numeric Lua, a GUI library (GTK+ looks good!), a plotting library, and whatever else Python has in its standard library. Also, a point-and-click mechanism for installing packages would help, but if your standard distribution is rich enough, you don't need a better installer. Luarocks seemed a bit rough right now.
2) More syntactic sugar for common things like lambdas and local-by-default functions (as I understand, the language can represent those without any problem). Perhaps some macro-type thing like metalua is the right answer? In fact, perhaps it should be metalua. In numerical analysis, we often need many more operators (look at the MATLAB pointwise operators) than the standard ones.
3) More speed! The standard interpreter is a bit too slow (my standard test is spectralnorm from the shootout -- I use that one because I originated that test, maybe I should use other tests too...) I tried the LuaJIT, but the current version is broken in Windows. I tried compiling LuaJIT in cygwin and MinGW, in XP and Vista, and each time, it produces an executable that doesn't work. (Depending on the situation, it either immediately returns to the shell prompt, it hangs, or it complains about some null pointer dereference or thing like that.)

I'm sure you have ambitious plans for Lua, and I think that moving towards this stuff will not only benefit my little numerical corner of the universe, but like Python, everyone will love it.

That's it. Keep up the great work, I hope Lua takes over the world!

-- 
Sébastien Loisel