Porting a lua program with GUI to windows

[Michael Gerbracht <smartmails@...>]

Hello,

I have written a complex lua program including a highly complex GUI on a
small platform (RISC OS). It's all done in pure lua code. Now I would like to
port this program to windows and - if possible - to Mac OS and Linux as well.
It is planned to be a commercial product and it needs high end GUI support -
which seems to be a problem. I already started twice to port the software.

First I tried wxlua but it did not work in the way I needed it to work (can't
remeber exactly what was the problem).

Then I tried lqt but I also ended up with instabilitites and a problem with
calling privat methods.

Now I am thinking about looking into .net and luainterface. But before I
start again I would like to ask you whether this would be a good decision. It
is not as platform independent as the other toolkits I tried first but with
Mono it might be possible to use it on Linux (and Mac OS?) - but platform
independence does not have the highest priority for me.

The program focuses on data analysis and producing scientific graphs. I need
support for the following features in luainterface:
 - The main program is a lua program which holds all the data and does all 
   calculations and I would also like to deal with all windows, dialogs etc.
   from within lua.
 - (I do not want to just call some lua function from C or C#)
 - GUI requirements:
   - drag & drop, for example: select some columns of a table and drag them 
     to another position in this table
   - Support for Ribbons or at least tabbed toolbars
   - Support Tabs like in a browser
   - Select columns/rows in a data table from within lua code
 - Is there anything that can be done when using .net with C++/C#, which
   is not possible with lua/luainterface?
 - Is the project still beeing developed and is there a place to get help 
   (here in this list?)
 - Is the latest version of .net and lua supported (I am not using lua 5.2  
   features ATM, but there may be demand in future)?

Are there other alternatives I did not think of? If it is not possible to
write a full GUI application with lua, I was thinking of splitting GUI and
main program. So I would then use my lua program as something like a server
and write a GUI Client in C++/C#.

So would you recommend to use luainterface or do you think that a
client/server solution would be the better choice?

Thanks,
Michael Gerbracht