Re: Question about ConcurrentLua and general documentation of libraries

Thanks Steve. I did check out 'Lua Lanes', and I will certainly revisit it. However based on my very-quick comparison of multiple libraries for the task, I found APR or other POSIX wrappers to be bit too Unix'y (as expected) in their treatment of threads, tasks and inter-thread/task-communication. As for ConcurrentLua, it seemed extremely familiar based on my past exposure to Erlang, which seemed to make the parallel/distributed computing extremely simple (almost no-brainer).

As it turns out, that --

1. I was not necessarily looking at all the right places (coincidentally, I picked a list of libraries which happened to have little documentation, but there are many which do have some documentation)

2. I was expecting only HTML documentation, in a directory called doc/

3. there was no way other than to check out the entire Github repository (or that of individual libraries), of LuaDist, to get the associated documentation..

So, clearly things aren't as bad as it looked initially.

I spent some good many hours last night, cherry-picking what I need, organizing (a bit) in a structure I find easier to deal with, keeping only doc/ and sample/ (either or both, based on what was available). Now I have on my PC a folder containing most library docs. If someone is interested, I can share the ZIP file, but unfortunately, it is only a static snapshot at best ! For the moment, I'd think that it is my minimal contribution to the wonderful community! Hope to be able to do more.

Also, if I ever happen to create libraries of my own, I would try to make reasonable efforts in documenting it.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:02 PM, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:

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.