On 12 March 2017 at 09:26, 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!
There is, of course, the C speed advantage, but somehow the Python community
– unlike the Lua one – seems to favor libraries written in Python, and as a
result they have created an enormous ‘ecosystem’ for pretty much anything –
an achievement which in itself is hard to beat.
(We shouldn’t overlook that in today’s world, a language’s popularity and
longevity is largely proportional to the amount of publically available
source code written in it.)
I can only hope the Lua community would start doing the same at some point –
but I think, unfortunately, both I and Lua will die hoping.
Why would you want all lua libraries to be written in lua?
Leveraging existing libraries, whether they be written in C, fortran,
rust or whatever is a great choice.
Using developer time to reimplement things in another language "just
because" is a huge waste of time (and money).
