Re: Survey of lua sandboxes?

[Patrick <patrick@...>]

On 11-12-26 03:59 PM, hollyrosella@hushmail.com wrote:

Thanks, Patrick.  Yes, that's very helpfu.  I found the talk: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3894

He says about 4 minutes in that lua is not good for numerical computation, which gives me pause.  (I'm checking out numlua.)

He mentions the banking application about 16m51s in.  Is this thread talking about the same application?  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pypy-dev/2007-February/003558.html  ("I'm currently building a distributing financial trading application that allows users to write trading models in python and lua. I had to introduce lua, since there is no way to completely "secure" user models written in cPython.")

Holly.

Hi Holly

I think this video is great, it brings up some topics.

One, I hope you will agree that Roberto is very bright and handles difficult people well(I don't). If you are considering Lua, there is an awesome community behind it, right from helpful newbies to the design team itself. However it's so great that I have spent most of the last two years trying to code everything in Lua, this was a mistake.

Two, Roberto discussed the myth of the general purpose programming language in the video. Lua isn't perfect for every application. Library support is patchy and changing this is not a priority for the design team. Lua really shines if you need to embedded it where feature rich/fat pig languages like Python, PHP and Ruby won't fit. It's good for embedding and extending, use caution outside of this.

As Ezequiel had mentioned, you could write code to handle numeric computations in C and then call it from Lua. You can also do this with Fortran too.

-Patrick