Re: Question about ConcurrentLua and general documentation of libraries

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 7:51 AM, Jayanth Acharya <jayachar88@gmail.com> wrote:
> in Erlang in the past, and absolutely loved for it's shared-nothing
> distributed concurrent processing. ConcurrentLua seems to mimic it to an
> extent.

There's also Lua Lanes, which uses channels to pass data between
separate Lua states ('lanes'). At least it may be better documented ;)
 luaposix allows you to do old-fashioned POSIX share-nothing
concurrency using pipes to pass data and signals for synchronization.

> LuaDist tells me that majority of libraries have little or no documentation.
> Is there a easy way to infer the library's API if all one has is C code ?

Not really. C code is a terrible way to document anything.  LDoc does
allow people to generate documentation from doc comments in C source,
but someone has to _want_ to do that ;) [1]

A few good examples are worth a lot; I'm surprised that people don't
include more in their packages, since surely they wrote quite a few
when testing?  And classic 'unit tests' are not such good
documentation as people think, because they often don't have a good
narrative.

[1] or contribute comments.  It's a great way for a person to add
value to a project, becoming its documentation maintainer.