Re: mathlib

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

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Michael Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> wrote:
> In this model there would also be Lua "distros" that bundle the Lua language
> kernel together with various suites of external libraries.

That's pretty much the idea behind Lua for Windows and LuaDist
Batteries (which supercedes old LfW and is available for other
platforms as well).  People don't mind a 15Meg download if all the
commonly used extras are bundled.

On Linux, same effect is achieved by common Lua extensions being
available through the package manager.  (Or LuaRocks, which is a
platform-independent package manager.).

There have been a number of 'fat' Lua executables published which
bundle the common stuff into one exe. E.g. 'lake.exe' bundles Lake,
LuaFileSystem and winapi into one 344Kb file.

I've often thought that Roberto and co are in a similar position to
Linus Torvalds and his kernel team; they look after the language, the
rest of the world looks after extensions ("userland"). They may
contribute extensions but they are in no way 'canonical'.

steve d.