iWhatever Development

[John Passaniti <john@...>]

I've decided that the world needs more iPhone/iPod/iPad applications.
It's a new platform for me, and while Objective-C looks to be a fine
language, I would rather code in Lua and get all the standard benefits
that I don't have to explain to anyone on this mailing list.

The folks at Ansca offer Corona, and it looks like it will do 90% of
what I want-- it's the other 10% that worries me.  It appears that
Corona doesn't just provide wrappers around Apple's APIs, but adds
functionality.  And it looks great-- except that there are APIs I need
to access from my application that Corona doesn't offer.  And normally
that wouldn't be a problem-- I would just write a Lua wrapper around
the API.  I don't think Apple allows dynamic loading of modules, but I
could certainly statically bind my wrappers to the application and
register them.  No problem.

Well, apparently there is a problem.  I haven't tried it yet, but it
appears that development with Corona works by compiling your Lua
scripts, binding them to a Lua interpreter, and linking against
Apple's APIs.  Or something like that.  My guess is that I wouldn't
have any problem writing the wrapper and even telling the linker to
include my code-- but how would I register my wrapper with Lua?  That,
I guess, is the problem.

It doesn't sound like a hard problem to overcome.  Couldn't they just
provide a hook function that called any user-provided code with a Lua
state?

Maybe someone who has used Corona can comment.  Maybe I'll learn that
it's a much harder problem.  Or maybe, someone has found a way around
this so that I can happily send my $99 to them and bask in the glow of
Lua on my iWhatever.