Re: help to (slightly) modify Lua interpreter

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

2009/11/5 Francesco Abbate <francesco.bbt@gmail.com>:
> 2009/11/5 Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@gmail.com>:
>> If you don't mind modifying Lua itself, why can't you use Metalua ?
>> What's the difference between a patched Lua and Metalua ?
>
> Well, I could use Metalua, this is something that I will take into
> consideration, but using it will add a significant layer of complexity
> to my software. In fact, metalua allows you to modify Lua as your need
> even at runtime but this is not really needed in my case since I want
> a simple modification of Lua to be used over and over, always the
> same. So, I think that a change in Lua will be justified, the only
> problem could be the technical difficulty of implementing this change.
> In addition I think that the Lua code base is more mature and stable
> than Metalua.

The point was that Lua is not meant to be modified (at least not more
than any open source project) beyond the numerous adjustment you can
do in luaconf.h. Metalua on the other hand is precisely meant to help
you adapt Lua syntax to your needs. Surely Metalua can do huge things,
but it can also do little things, just like C can be used to write a
supercomputer operating system or a keyboard firmware.

And while I agree in the end your patch will be smaller than the full
Metalua sources, the work you will have to do yourself may be much
bigger.