Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

[Phil Leblanc <philanc@...>]

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Jeff Rouse <jeffr@activestate.com> wrote:
>
> If you would like to ask any questions or provide thoughts on where we can
> best help the Lua community, feel free to respond to this thread, email me,
> or sign up to our mail list (http://www.activestate.com/lua) for advanced
> notice of when our distribution is available. We look forward to hearing
> from you!


Hi Jeff,

Nice to see ActiveState  moving to Lua.

>From my limited experience, the big ActiveState success in corporate
space (...meaning paying customers) is ActivePerl on Windows. I don't
know if it matches with your sales figures, but this is what I have
observed.

I believe that this gives a good indication of what could be done with Lua.

- I guess all Lua users on Linux just won't pay for a Lua that they
already know how to install - Do you make any money with Perl on Unix?

- A big difference between Lua and, say, Python, is that Lua doesn't
come "with batteries included".  So I guess that the most profitable
area would be to deliver a strong Lua-with-batteries on Windows.

- ... Steve Donovan's winapi [1] comes to mind but I don't know enough
about alternative or complementary libraries for Windows.

[1] https://github.com/stevedonovan/winapi

- except if you envision a special deal with LuaJIT, you should
probably focus on Lua 5.3 which deliver significant improvements over
previous versions (real 64-bit integers, binary operators overs these,
string pack/unpack for binary data handling, minimal UTF8 support
(maybe not that useful on Windows -or not), ...

- a bundled solution allowing to produce a stand-alone executable from
a Lua script would be a definite plus for the sort of ActiveState Perl
customers,

- a library/framework for simple UI (a sort of GtkDialog :-)) on
Windows would certainly help too.

HTH,

Phil