Re: As standalone mode

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

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Emeka <emekamicro@gmail.com> wrote:
> real data before responding to him. So, I would need this: list of
> applications on the web where Lua is used in a standalone mode

It's true that there are less 'standalone' applications using Lua than
(say) Python.  Or to put it better, less of them than you would expect
from the popularity of the language itself.  One is indeed that Lua is
easy to embed and is well suited to that role; the other is that Lua
is a language core, not a distribution.  Apart from relatively small
tools, nearly all Lua applications need more than the standard library
can provide, and so are more awkward to deploy than Python apps, where
you already have the kitchen sink installed.

However, it's easier to produce standalone executables that have
enough Lua to be useful  (Making an executable from a non-trivial
Python program is a pain).  For instance, I use luabuild to distribute
lake as a single 340Kb Windows executable with no dependencies.  On
Ubuntu/Debian, it's straightforward to produce .deb packages for Lua
apps since all the common libraries are in the repos.  But this is
perhaps another discussion altogether.....

steve d.