Re: Google Summer of Code 2013

[Eric Wing <ewmailing@...>]

First, I'm also offering to mentor for LuaCocoa. I really would like
to get it ported to iOS. (Also, I talked to some folks about getting
it to work on Android too which is a longer story.)
Optimistically, I think the iOS port would take 2 weeks by somebody
who knows what they are doing. By a student (or me, har! har!), I
think it could fill up the term, but I think is very doable.

So there are 3 other themes in this thread I want to address.
- Administrative stuff/requirements for GSoC
I think last time we said the ideal case is Roberto/PUC-Rio would be
the official front end for the application process and any mentors and
students would be under this umbrella.

- Build systems
I am still interested in resurrecting CMakeLua as another potential
GSoC project.

- GUIs
I have strong opinions on cross-platform GUIs, usually because they
don't feel "right"/native on each platform. I also think the approach
is usually wrong. The good UI toolkits use dynamic languages for good
reason. Cocoa is the extreme end of it which uses all sorts of dynamic
tricks for core functionality. Most cross-platform GUIs approach the
problem from C++ which is probably the worst language for GUI
programming because you lose something in translation when trying to
communicate across the static/dynamic language boundary.

Instead, I think Lua should be the glue language instead of C++
because it is even more portable than C++ and is a very dynamic
language which loses less in translation crossing language boundaries.
And because Lua is designed for embedding and extending, it is easy to
go native when you need more fine grained control.

I actually see LuaCocoa as a piece of a much larger picture. I imagine
a common library in Lua which stands on top of LuaCocoa for Obj-C,
LuaJava or JNLua for Java (I'm thinking of Android mostly, but Swing,
SWT, etc could work too), and LuaInterface for C#. I actually have a
lot more to say about what this library looks like, but this is
already too long. I'm actually trying to put a talk together for next
week on LuaCocoa. We'll see if I get it done :)


Thanks,
Eric
-- 
Beginning iPhone Games Development
http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook/