Is Lua stable? (Was: Strange Operators (Was: Why I leave Lua (Was: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available)))

[Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@...>]

Hello again.

As I mentioned in other posts, I've recently started embedding Lua
into my Objective-C (OS X) applications. Besides my short stint trying
to use and configure "awesome" (a window manager), this has been my
first real in-depth usage of Lua.

I really like where it is now! But I realize it has not always been
where it is now. Even as recently as Lua 5.1, there have been breaking
changes. But Lua has gone through massive changes from the time it was
publicly released at 1.1 all the way through the current 5.2. Not just
in the C API, but in syntax and semantics. Much of this was added
complexity, but fortunately it's all remained very orthogonal so far
and still relatively simple compared to other "scripting languages".

Now, looking at the timeline page[1], it looks like development is
rapidly declining. There have only been 4 years between 1.0 and 3.0, 3
years between 3.0 and 4.0, 3 years between 4.0 and 5.0 which was
released 11 years ago, and since then we've been seeing only minor
version changes.

It makes sense that Lua's development "progress" (for lack of a better
word) would be rapidly declining, if its features are stabilizing to
the point where it's good enough for the purpose it sets out for: to
be the ideal general purpose language to embed in a C host.

But a very small part of me is concerned that it will continue to grow
in breaking ways, eventually adding a disproportionate amount of
complexity simply for the sake of continuing to work on it when
there's nothing left to work on.

So what is the long-term roadmap? What's the plan after 5.3 is
released? Are there any major features for 6.0? I ask out of
curiosity, and to get a general idea of the roadmap which I may use to
form a long-term plan of my own personal future using Lua for
extensibility.

Thank you for your time and God bless.

-Anonymous

[1]: http://www.lua.org/versions.html