Re: Why Lua is not more popular

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:

>[...]I don't need a default package that exposes every nook and
> cranny of XML to my scripting language and gives me 5 different
> paradigms to choose from.

I know what you mean, but XML's a very bad example. Unless you do a
phenomenal amount of coding, any home-brew XML tweaker will depend on
the spacing and line breaking of the input XML, and that's a horrible
mess.

Yes, but for instance I've recently done some work with libXML which handles all that. But I don't need a "require 'luaxml'" that provides me the full access to everything libXML offers, which is way overkill. I need maybe two or three calls into C to pass some XML to a function that uses libXml to turn XML into lua tables, which I can do in C and keep the interface between C and lua simple and minimal.

> The fantastic thing about lua is that it's so easy to connect with
> C/C++ that I don't really care whether it comes with batteries. If
> there's a library that has a C/C++ API I write a quick class to
> provide the functionality, have the class bound automatically into
> lua and boom, I have what I need in lua.

You really, really, REALLY need to document exactly how you make these
Lua wrappers for C libraries, publish it publicly, and let the Lua
website link to it.

I really would love to but I have to work on convincing my employer to open source it. I haven't looked closely at LuaBind, but I imagine it is very similar to that. Basically it's a set of C++ templates that generate bindings for class instantiation and calling methods or static functions, doing all the marshalling between lua and C/C++ automatically. If I was starting today I would probably use LuaBind, but at the time I began there wasn't anything like that available.

That being said, my impression has always been that C at least (I hate
C++) doesn't have the wealth of libraries that Perl and Python do.

Sure, Perl/Python/Ruby have a lot of libraries that are fully implemented in the native language, but a lot of what people look at on the question of "Does it have lots of libraries?" will be bindings to C /C++ libraries. And that matters with Perl/Python/Ruby because writing a binding is a mess, and requires you to use SWIG or some other awful tool. The simple stack based interface between Lua and C makes the question of whether somebody's already done it much less of an issue, even if you don't have a template library to make it even easier.

Matt