Re: Why Lua is not more popular

[Dong Feng <middle.fengdong@...>]

2013/9/13 dcharno <dcharno@comcast.net>

I've tried to evangelize Lua on a number of projects. The issue for me has been standard libraries and the realization that there's not much interest in positioning Lua as alternative to other standalone scripting languages. I work on embedded platforms were size and performance are valued. People concede Lua is smaller, cleaner and faster (especially with LuaJIT). But, the platforms are changing and size has become much less an issue. Team members feel if we're going to add another language it might as well be something we can use on both the target and development machines for tools and various utilities. Python is already ubiquitous there and has a decent set of libraries builtin. That makes it hard to get enough "critical mass" for Lua adoption.

I find the contrary in some projects. I need to convince nobody to integrate Lua because it just like using boost::shared_ptr in your project. I only need to guarantee my use of Lua is local, and then others start picking it to solve their problem, and slowly some effort is put to coordinate the project-wise use.