Re: Why Lua is not more popular

["Pierre Chapuis" <catwell@...>]

> On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 14:13:05 +0200
> steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:

> I hope this new initiative will tell which rocks are pure Lua, and
> which need compilation. When choosing, from my perspective, having to
> compile removes four points on a ten point scale. Having to compile a
> language library is just soooooo Perl, and my Perl days are over.
>
> Disclaimer: I do mostly office automation type software, so native Lua
> performance is more than sufficient, and I write a lot of free software
> that others use, so deployment is a real issue for me.

Yes, I was thinking about that precise issue yesterday. This is
definitely something I want and need, but it is not as easy
as it looks, because there are shades of grey in "purity".

For instance, a pure Lua module which depends on a C-based module
may not be helpful. Except maybe if it depends only on very
popular libraries that most people who use Lua as their main language
use (luasocket, lpeg, lfs...).

Also, we now have something new which is "pure LuaJIT" (i.e. modules
which depend on the FFI).

-- 
Pierre Chapuis