Re: LuaPlus popularity

[Rob Kendrick <rjek@...>]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:50:50AM -0400, mark@anticentertainment.com wrote:
> I'm investigating using LuaPlus instead of Lua. The features page on Lua plus.org sounds very compelling - but I'm concerned about the state of this project. Scouring the net there are only a few inklings of activity; they are years old. The luaplus.org site seems dead, no activity on the forums, no obvious set of tutorials or documentation and even the link to download the code is broken on the front page.
> 
> Do many people here use LuaPlus actively? On this mailing list there doesn't seem to be much chatter about it. 

My immediate reaction is to avoid something that claims to be based on a
version of Lua that does not exist.  My complaints on some of their
'improvements':

"All the power of the core Lua 5.01 work distribution."

No such version, and ambiguous.  Best possible case is that it's some
sort of fork of 5.0.1 while was still a "work" version, or something.
That still means it's ancient.

"An optional high performance reference counted garbage collector."

Lua's GC is already high-performance.  And I bet this reference-counted
one leaks.

"An easy to use C++ interface"

The C interface is already trivial and easy to use.

"Serialization of Lua tables."

This is a simple function to write yourself, and there are dozens of
examples on the Wiki.

"Enhanced metatables, wherein basic types, such as strings can have an
associated metatable. It only takes a few more lines of code to add this
support, and what a world of difference it makes."

Yes, I bet it makes a world of difference by destroying performance and
readability of the sources.

Also, I have a distrust of anybody who can't use hyphens :)

B.