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

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 3:03 AM, Alex Queiroz <asandroq@gmail.com> wrote:

Hallo,

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 9:00 AM, Tim Mensch <tim-lua-l@bitgems.com> wrote:

I think there's a danger in stock Lua going in directions where Mike Pall doesn't want to follow; I'm sure I'm not the only one who cares about speed and stability, and the farther PUC Lua is from LuaJIT, the less relevant PUC Lua is to people like me. [1]

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. When looked from this point of view everything that PUC does makes sense. If your software embeds Lua 5.1 or Lua 5.2, it can continue to do so for several years until you decide to upgrade and make all the relevant changes, maybe even skipping versions.

The fact that many people like Lua as a stand-alone language is a happy side-effect.

Cheers,

Alex Silva

I tried to make this same point (in the parent thread) and concluded that MoonScript might end up being the... pressure release?

I think LuaJIT could be a better prediction. Perhaps there would be some kind of breaking point, and then LuaJIT will start to include language-level innovations that are incompatible with Lua.

I use to spend personal time worrying about this sort of thing. I don't any more. It could be good for both projects.

It would be a future where LuaJIT would advances and Lua evolves.

-Andrew