Re: Reasons for a Web Developer to use Lua?

[Michael Gogins <michael.gogins@...>]

Hate is a matter of personal taste, but if you can moderate your hate
of C++ I would advise you to. Much of the really difficult, demanding,
high-performance software in the world is written in C and especially
C++. It is used for fighter plane avionics, Microsoft Office, database
engines, physics experiment data analysis, real-time trading systems,
and so on. Not to mention almost all computer games. The people who
selected C++ for these tasks were not basing their choice on personal
taste.

LuaJIT+FFI is very exciting indeed, but until it supports metamethods
for C types and native multi-threading it will not be competing in the
same space as C++ for these kinds of challenges.

Of course I hope that LuaJIT+FFI soon will support metamethods for C
types and native multi-threading...

Regards,
Mike

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:45 PM, Tim Johnson <tim@johnsons-web.com> wrote:
> * Chris Babcock <cbabcock@asciiking.com> [110315 14:27]:
>> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Tim Johnson <tim@johnsons-web.com> wrote:
>>
>> That's one option. Lua is also the best choice if you have legacy
>> software you want to expose as a service or if you want to expose a
>> programming API to users.
>  Yeah, good to hear, that was in the back of my mind.
>> Sputnik may look a little like the "20 minute wiki" demo from what was
>> formerly known as TurboGears, but it's a wiki that lets you do
>> everything that could be done in TG 2.x... and do it all from the web
>> interface. Sputnik also smokes anything implemented on a Python MVC
>> framework in responsiveness despite this additional flexibility. Even
>> if you don't want to use Sputnik or expose that kind of power on the
>> web interface, you can still use many of the same components in your
>> own stack.
>>
>> Also, using Lua directly as a data definition language is not the same
>> as using Pickle in Python.
>  I've worked with rebol and newlisp and both make saving code much
>  easier than in python - and easier to trouble-shoot.
>> Lua is very readable in serialized format,
>> loads fast, and exhibits stable performance over a well-documented
>> range of data set sizes. Not that you can't do relational data with
>> Lua, but you get to make that choice.
>>
>> There were some good points made about Lua and Apache for the $5
>> hosting set and I've been assuming you want something MVC-like,
>
>  Not really - I had more in mind perhaps some special need not met
>  by python, such as lua's embeddability (sp?) I've got my own MVC
>  and I hope to make it 'fit' with django, if need be.
>
>  Thanks Chris and also for the CC, I looked at MoSync. Looks like
>  lua could be valuable there if it co-exists with C++. I used to
>  code in C++, I hated it, from what I've read in the Ierusalimschy
>  book I have here - wouldn't one be possible to compile Lua into a
>  C++ application as well as a `C` application?
>
>  thanks again
> --
> Tim
> tim at johnsons-web dot com or akwebsoft dot com
> http://www.akwebsoft.com
>
>



-- 
Michael Gogins
Irreducible Productions
http://www.michael-gogins.com
Michael dot Gogins at gmail dot com