Re: Raspberry Pi and Lua

[Bogdan Marinescu <bogdan.marinescu@...>]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:31 PM, sergei karhof <karhof21@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just decided I would start a thread about Raspberry Pi, in the hope
> that some interesting and stimulating information could be gathered
> from other people.
> As you probably know, a few days ago the Raspberry Pi [1] "computer"
> was launched, at $35. It is a "single-board" computer, looking more
> like a microcontroller than a computer as we normally conceive it, but
> nonetheless a real computer system (running a Linux distro). The
> thingy is quite impressive, I must say.
>
> This opens vistas that were previously unthinkable: a dirt cheap
> "computer" which at the same time is fairly powerful (given its price)
> and can be used to interface with a virtually unlimited range of
> peripherals (as in "home automation", for instance). I don't know if I
> am the only one who feels like a revolution is at the horizon.
>
> Now, coming to Lua, what strikes me as most is the *absence* of
> support for Lua, especially considering the fact that (according to
> Wikipedia), the Raspberry Pi unit will support several programming
> languages: Python, BBC Basic, C and (shudder) Perl. But no mention of
> Lua, which is my opinion would be the ideal candidate (ok, Python too
> is fine...).
>
> We already know from the eLua project that Lua can be a good embedded
> language. In fact I was expecting eLua to jump at this tremendous
> opportunity. But instead a post by Bogdan (eLua's author) on his blog
> [2] indicates that he is not interested.
> I am quite disappointed, because at this point there are no projects,
> from I understand, that are willing to make Lua work on the Raspberry
> Pi.
> Bogdan, are you there? Please reconsider your decision. I think you
> must not miss this boat at any cost...

I'm here, a little late to the party :) While I stand by my original
point (which is "no eLua on RPi, use standard Lua instead") I'm still
very much interested in Lua on RPi as a separate project. Personally,
the thing that I find most interesting about a board in this price
range is that it has a HDMI video output. Combine this with its nice
connectivity options and you could have the perfect little video
interfacing system. I'm talking about all kinds of video intefaces:
home automation, in-vehicle, industrial controls, media players, photo
frames, VNC-like remote displays, advertising, you name it. Add some
arbitrary data acquisition system that uses the RPi peripherals (SPI,
GPIO, UART...) and you suddenly have a very powerful toy in your
hands. Stir carefully with a bit of LuaJIT and that's not a toy
anymore, it's something that you can actually use in real life in lots
of applications. What's missing at this point is a simple, efficient
way to actually code something like this. Sure, you could code GUIs in
C++ with all the various frameworks out there, but that's neither
simple, nor neccessary efficient. You could do it in Python, but I've
just got my RPi a few days ago and my feeling is that its resources
would be much better handled by Lua. So, what I'm looking at now (very
high level at the moment) is some Lua+GUI combo that can be ported to
RPi. I've got a bit of experience with wxWidgets and wxPython (don't
shoot!) so wxLua sounds like a natural candidate, but my feeling is
that wxWidgets might be a bit too "heavy" for RPi, almost on par with
Qt or GTK. IUP, on the other hand ... I'm still looking at this, but
I'd be very happy to hear what other people think.
On a somewhat related note, there is a little thing called "Raspbian"
on http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads now, which is a recent RPi
Linux image with hard float. Wondering what's the LUAJit+armhf status
...

Best,
Bogdan

>
> What do you guys think about it?
>
>
> --sergei
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
> [2] http://eluabrain.blogspot.com/2011/11/brainz-brainz-braaaaaaaaainz.html
>