Re: Lua OS

[Martin Guy <martinwguy@...>]

On 23 April 2012 05:25, Alessandro Delgado <adelgado1313@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I'd /really/ like would be a fully Lua-based operating system.
>
> Taking something like eLua booting on bare x86 and make it up from there.

Why? If you were a fan of Basic or Perl or shell scripts, would you
want to write an OS in them?

Already we sell a board that runs eLua as its entire operating system
but anything beyond a single flow of control is beyond its abilities.
You'd have to write everything with coroutines and some kind of
scheduler and so on - a bit like teaching a poodle to dance.

If you want to create an application  with little effort, that is
relatively easy to write and within the abilities of Lua/eLua, it's
fine. If you want anything that needs preemptive multitasking, or a
rich set of libraries then Lua/eLua is the wrong tool for the job.

In part this would be helped if eLua implemented Lua Socket, Lua File
System, LuaPosix and so on - the basic modules that every other
package needs - but instead it has its own whimsical and incomplete
library interfaces for everything. The only standard parts are most of
the built-in Lua libraries: io.*(), string.*() and so on. Even os.*()
is absent.

One project in the "Lua OS" direction would be to reimplement eLua
dumping all the eLua extensions and implementing os.*(), Lua socket,
LFS, luaposix and onwards, to make an embedded platform that standard
Lua applications would run on.

Then the world would be yours...

    M