Re: Breakthrough dream

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Rodrigo Azevedo once stated:
> Based on the thread 'Selenophobia', and your major experience, choose 5
> characteristics you think indispensable to keep Lua advancing as a
> "general-purpose script language";

  0) Port LuaJIT to Lua 5.3.  That alone would probably solve most of the
     issues.  I think Mike Pall did a too good of a job with LuaJIT and it's
     probably the biggest reason for the continued use of Lua 5.1

> 1) an expanded basic library (some batteries), well organized, maintained
> and documented. "Pure Lua" libraries at least.

  Aren't there a few projects out there doing this already?

> 2) easy installation on major operating systems (with shared libraries)

  Easy installation on Windows.  FTFY.

> 3) threads (pthreads!? not Lua's coroutine)

  No.  Lua can support threads (you just need to implement lua_lock() and
lua_unlock()) but if you do that, you'll end up with a Lua that's about as
fast as Python or Ruby.  

> 4) optional type annotations (performance, error check etc)

  I know of at least one variation on Lua that does this, Ravi.

> 5) easy, transparent, way to port libraries to new versions of Lua.

  Given the slow release rate of Lua, I don't think this is as much of a
concern.  But it might be nice if LuaRocks (CLI tool and website) had an
easy way to restrict searches to modules of a particular version of Lua
(5.1, LuaJIT, 5.2, 5.3)

  -spc