Re: Wishlists and Modules (was [ANN] libmc)

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2009/9/4 John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk>:
> As you say Jerome, it is easy enough to internalise the "C" parts of the library (as long as you have the source and it is well written). But this is not true of the Lua bits.
>
> This is actually why I tend to swim against the stream on this one and implement as much as possible of the "infrastructure" in C leaving Lua for specific application code. The ability to use the Lua API as a kind of C toolkit means it is quite easy to translate a Lua prototype into C.

This all comes down to the fact that C don't allow embedding large
text files in programs easily, or that some people write Lua modules.
It's very nice that some people (like the Lua authors) take time to
write C modules when they could take less time to do the same in pure
Lua or a C/Lua hybrid, but as the language becomes popular and the
"level" of modules gets higher, doing it all in C is just too much
work.

Feel free to rewrite socket.http or socket.url in C, and send it to
the LuaSocket maintainer, he will probably include it in the next
release. But some people don't even know C and can only write Lua
modules. Are you going to ignore those people open source work just
because your application build system (your C compiler) is too limited
?