Re: Why I leave Lua (Was: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available)

[GrayFace <sergroj@...>]

On 10.07.2014 15:03, Alex Queiroz wrote:
> It would be interesting if LuaJIT became its own language, changed 
> name, and finally split. The user bases are not really the same: Lua 
> has always been and will always be for embedding in as many platforms 
> as possible.

That's why the split is bad, even though it's happening. Taday, if 
LuaJIT doesn't support a platform, Lua 5.1 can be used instead, that's 
convenient.
However, in order to keep them in sync the authors must cooperate.

I'm on 5.1 and not planning a transition in any near future because I 
haven't seen changes that would make me do the switch. I didn't keep a 
close eye on 5.3 though.
Lua desperately needs a form of optional static typing, not those gotos 
with ugly syntax. LuaJIT goes in a more practical direction than Lua.

As a side note, Lua and LuaJIT approaches still have a lot in common. 
Implementation significantly influences their design. E.g. in Lua 5.2 
you must set a metatable for an object after you set __gc field in it, 
which only makes sense for efficiency. LuaJIT dropped tail call count 
and made hooks global for the sake of efficiency. //Hooks belonging to 
threads only brought me troubles in stock Lua anyway.

--
Best regards,
Sergey Rozhenko                 mailto:sergroj@mail.ru