Re: [ANNOUNCE] Objective Lua

["E. Wing" <ewmailing@...>]

> I wrote the web page very late last night, and forgot to mention
> Objective C bridging (I've just added a bit on that). What's the state
> of LuaObjC? Does it work these days?

It still works, but badly needs to be rewritten. It depends on Obj-C
1.0 runtime functions which are now deprecated and don't exist in
64-bit. I spoke to the MacRuby engineer a year ago and got a basic
idea of how MacRuby does its bridging. There is a key piece of code
that can be reused for other bridges. I jotted down a bunch of notes
but haven't had time to pursue it.

Meanwhile, I patched the existing legacy bridge to be garbage
collection aware and fixed up some major memory leaks. I also have
been working with pieces from Gus Mueller's LuaCore and added some
hand-crafted bindings for the C-parts of Core Animation, though this
is all intended as a temporary layer on the bridge. The next-gen
bridge at least on Mac should be using Bridge Support (like MacRuby
and PyObjC).

We still lack a good object model. From the one minute I've seen of
Objective Lua, it is very compelling. Is the translation done all
through Lua (no C)? If so, this reminds me a lot of Objective-J and
what the 280 North folks did to Javascript for their web based
application framework called Cappuccino.

There are two other technologies also of potential interest to a new
Lua/Obj-C bridge. First is llvm-lua. The other is Lua Wax which was
mentioned on this list last week.

-Eric