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Hi Phil,
We sell and have customers for all our distros on all platforms, and I'm not just talking Win/Mac/Linux. We also sell all of them to varying degrees on AIX, HPUX, Solaris and even on top of very old architectures. There is a vast array of needs out there... 

Batteries included is indeed a good approach which VSP also mentioned.
Mason also suggested a GUI framework. Is this a huge need do you feel? We often hear this a problem in other languages as well but it is usually a very difficult thing to maintain longer term and never seems important enough in this age of web front ends. 

Cheers,

-JR

On 2016-11-03 5:14 PM, Phil Leblanc wrote:

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