Re: [ANNOUNCE] Objective Lua

[David Given <dg@...>]

E. Wing wrote:
[...]
> 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).

How much of this is OSX-specific? Will it work with GNUstep, for example 
(since I don't have a Mac handy...)

Also, how much introspection can you do on a bridged object? Do you see 
them simply as opaque Lua objects with method calls peered over to 
Objective C, or does the full Objective C class hierarchy appear in Lua, 
which you can then add classes to, etc?

> 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.

About a minute is all it's worth; right now the Objective Lua 'compiler' 
is an almost trivial syntax hack. The object model is a traditional 
metatable-based Lua OO system. The only thing slightly interesting about 
it is that it supports class methods. In fact, it's currently all wrong, 
and I need to rewrite it. I think I've got a fairly simple design that 
can support categories.

I didn't know about Objective J; it's rather interesting, and very much 
the same sort of thing. In fact, I might steal some of their syntax.

There's been a surprising amount of interest. (The reddit link didn't 
help...) In the past 24 hours that one page alone has had 3300 hits. I 
usually get about 2000 hits a month *on my entire website*! Admittedly, 
only 36 actual code downloads, but it's certainly striking a chord with 
people. Maybe it *would* be worth doing properly...

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