RE: Why isn't Lua more widely used?

["Thijs Schreijer" <thijs@...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org [mailto:lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org]
> On Behalf Of William C. Bubel
> Sent: zondag 29 januari 2012 21:12
> To: Lua mailing list
> Subject: Re: Why isn't Lua more widely used?
> 
> On 01/28/2012 02:47 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> > I think the reason Lua's popularity distantly trails its quality and
> > utility is because what is available in Lua's LuaRocks is nowhere
> near
> > the maturity and utility of CPAN or the equivalent facilities for
> > Python and Ruby.
> 
> It would probably make an interesting exercise to see what are the most
> highly used CPAN modules and compare against LuaRocks to see which
> equivalents are missing. I'm sure there are probably a few modules that
> could be classified as low-hanging fruit, and trivially ported or
> otherwise created.
> 
> Not that I personally feel like it would make a dent in Lua's lack of
> popularity, nor should it since Lua's primary merits have been in its
> small size.

I often feel that every project starts by reinventing everything in Lua.
This doesn't necessarily mean writing all the code, but a lot of cutting and
pasting to build the basic library set for that specific project. Especially
for embedded stuff you wouldn't want it otherwise, because you want to
retain the small footprint. But if you're using Lua on a PC or anything
other with plenty power, who cares? I'm running Lua for windows, coming in
at roughly 25mb if I'm correct, use probably less than 5% of all that and
couldn't care less.

I think Lua would benefit from a standard set of optional libraries that
extend it with common functionality (at least I would welcome it), so it
would allow you to either choose the barebones or the fullservice model. But
without somewhat stronger steering there won't be anything like that. The
community, friendly as it is, also is very academical with strong opinions
on what's wrong and what's right, so it is hard to get a consensus
especially on a broad topic as this. Also this post; no critique intended,
it is what it is and I'm a happy user, it's just how human group dynamics
tend to work.

Re-reading this before posting; if there would be a standard set of
libraries, then (over time) probably everything else would be build on top
of that. So the current Lua landscape with many small independent (!)
libraries would disappear. This would make it a lot harder to retain the
small footprint, because grabbing some libraries you need would also require
resolving/including several dependencies and then you would still end up
with a much larger footprint because of that. And I don't really think I
would like that either.