Re: Why isn't Lua more widely used?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Francesco Abbate
<francesco.bbt@gmail.com> wrote:
> Lua cannot replace C or C++ for application where performances are
> important.

Obviously there are niches where you have to control every cycle and
byte. But otherwise, just using C/C++ can be premature optimization.
The game industry is very concerned with performance, but finds that
the right mix of C++ and Lua does the job.

>  With a JIT you are always at the merci of the JIT.

It used to be true that we were always at the mercy of C optimization,
but things have got much better.  LuaJIT is still young.

> to prefer Python to Lua is: the standard set of libraries are very
> complete and of very good quality: you have many things already there
> out of the box, you need just make sure that python itself is
> installed.

True enough, that's why we need to work on Lua distributions.  But
Python never struck me as being elegant, it has far too many built-in
types. And cool features like list comprehensions can result in short
but ugly code, etc.

I suspect there's a backlash against dynamic languages for big
application development because it's hard to catch typing errors and
navigate big projects (explicit motivation given for the
optionally-typed Dart language).  In the early years of the century
there were a lot of 'conversion stories', people discovering how much
fun Python and Ruby were and how productive they were compared to
their previous old dog (C++ or Java).  Now the conversion stories are
about people getting excited about static-but-inferred typed
languages, e..g people switching from Python to Go, etc.  The
challenge for dynamic languages is therefore tooling and environments
that can scale up.

steve d.