Re: Lua and backwards compatibility - was Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.4 (rc2) now available,

Subject: Re: Lua and backwards compatibility - was Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.4 (rc2) now available,
From: Duane Leslie &lt;parakleta@ ... &gt;
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2017 08:37:19 +1100

On 13 Jan 2017, at 04:48, Andrew Starks <andrew@starksfam.org> wrote:

I believe that the mission of simplicity would come into conflict many attempts to maintain strict backwards compatibility, when progress in the language is the goal.

Lua's primary use case is as an embedded library, not as a standalone language.

I am in full agreement with both of these statements. While I am disappointed that many libraries and tools never made the transition away from 5.1 and then others from 5.2 the value in Lua for me is that it is embeddable without any of the bloat required to support backwards compatibility.

I think actually the best solution for backwards compatibility for Lua wrt libraries would be for someone to develop something like the Babel transpiler for Lua to convert code between versions. Then library code could always be updated to the latest version and transpiled back to the older versions. Maybe using the ltokenp utility.

Regards,

Duane.