Re: and Lua marches on

[Jacques Chester <jacques@...>]

On 15/12/2009, at 11:13 PM, Francesco Abbate wrote:
> Lua is certainly better than PHP as scripting language but in order to
> replace PHP for server side programming you should:
> 1- implement a *secure* and *reliable* Apache module for Lua
> server-side scripting

I understand that mod_lua is scheduled to be included in the
default distribution of a future version of Apache.

> 2- provide a good set of libraries for most common and not-so-common
>  programming tasks

This one is largely a function of the size of the community.

> 3- convince the Web programmer to adopt Lua instead of PHP

This one is a function of many things: ease of starting,
availability of libraries, availability of Google-able answers
to common problems, documentation etc. Lua is a long way
behind on those, but that's OK.

What Lua does have, at the moment, is a clear performance
edge. None of the major web scripting languages - PHP,
Python, Ruby and Perl - comes within a cooee of it for speed
and modest requirements.

One of my daydreams is to write a proof-of-concept blog
system that takes advantage of the trend towards VPSes.
If your design can include OS elements, you can eliminate
a lot of "inner platform effect" warts and get the OS to
do some of the work for you. For example, you could create
a plugin system that actually creates a new OS user, folders
and database accounts for that plugin only. This would both
improve the security of the system overall and make it possible
to stop plugins stomping on performance (as they often do
in PHP's way of doing things).

Cheers,

JC.