Re: Comparison of numbers of 3rd party libraries

[zejian ju <juzejian@...>]

2015-05-13 11:11 GMT+08:00 Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com>:

First, LuaRocks is very nice, and has made some excellent improvements. Also, LuaDist and ZeroBrainStudio are extremely useful. The quality of the little eccosystem that Lua does have deserves a lot of credit for the noticeable improvements that people have made. 

I'll point out that, unlike _javascript_, a defining feature of Lua is its C-API, which should be thought of as a part of the language. This means that large eccosystems will always be a side show. Very often the eccosystems belong to the application that Lua is embedded into (Wikimedia, ConTeX, Lightroom plugins). Also, developers are likely to disable many features that module writers use: coroutines, access to other modules, etc. 

The second difference is Lua's focus on embedding, especially where resources are tight. I have not heard much in the way of JS advancing the way that it is embedded into applications, outside of webbrowsers. My understanding is that decisions made early on make _javascript_ more difficult to interact with from C, than Lua, but I have not researched that. 

Agree. Lua's fucus on embedding (IMO its C-API is also defined for this goal) makes it always a "side" language to assist the main applications, which are usually written in C/C++. But as the hardware is becoming more powerful, Lua (with so good design and implementation) deserves more general usage and acts as a "main" language for general application.