Re: Fully Lua YAML library?

["D. Matt Placek" <atomicsuntan@...>]

On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Tony Papadimitriou <tonyp@acm.org> wrote:

Unfortunately, one major downside of Lua (vs Python, for usual example) is the lack of libraries written in the language itself. 

Pretty much everything out there (and it’s not all that much, anyway) seems to be written in C as if those whose use Lua enjoy writing C more than writing Lua!

I do think partly that's because of the ease of interfacing Lua with C/C++ and the frequency that lua is used embedded in either a C/C++ environment.  If you already have the C environment and a C library, it's often quicker to write a binding to an existing C library than to write a pure Lua implementation from scratch.  But it does add extra complexity to have a dependency on building a C extension if you're just looking for something to use quickly and "off the shelf".

 

To get back to your request, maybe you’d be interested to clone PyYAML (or some other – many choices) from Python, and thus add one little stone to the (faint) pure Lua library ‘dogma’ by sharing it. :)

I think Pierre was right that part of the problem is the complexity of the YAML spec and it may just be more than I need at this point.  YAML's not a hard requirement for me, but I'd like a way to embed structured data in free-form text that's a bit more human friendly than JSON.  I'd probably look at other formats - HOCON or HJSON or OGDL or something over YAML if I'm going to implement it from scratch.