Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

[Phil Leblanc <philanc@...>]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 4:11 AM, Jeff Rouse <jeffr@activestate.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

As I have said before, what I have observed at my customers (large
corporate IT departments) is just ActivePerl (and a bit of
ActivePython) on Windows, both on servers and desktops (small
applications for various monitoring and support functions). So this is
a _very_ limited point of view.

Many of these small apps have a very simple GUI - typically one page
with a few fields, one or two dropdown lists and some options.  This
is why I was thinking more along the lines of GtkDialog than a full
fledged GUI framework.

A useful feature for this sort of use cases is also the ability to
bundle the app as a single executable that can be moved around without
installation.

HTH

Phil

>
>> 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
>>
>
>