Re: Selenophobia

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great pierre once stated:
> Hi,
> 
> My 2 cents....
> I think that having some access to metaprogramming (like in luaMacro or 
> metalua) in the core is a missing part of lua.  Having so can help 
> extend the language and ease language extension, adding new syntactic 
> sugar on the fly (for example, linked to an extension library (so 
> libraries will also include macro definition)).

  The issue I see with such a facility is that you can change the language
significantly enough that someone not familiar with the codebase (but with
Lua otherwise) might not understand what's going on.  I have enough problems
with getting my fellow cow-orkers to use Lua [1] without making it even
weirder.

> The threading will be great too... but I understand it will prevent lua 
> to be compiled on some systems... may be, at least, a parallel_for in 
> the language with a default implementation to a normal for, and a link 
> to tbb where available?

  At what point is is cheaper to create the threads vs. just doing
everything sequentially?  A thousand elements?  A million?  Ten?  

  Also, once you allow threading access to a single Lua state, you have the
Python problem of a global interpreter lock.

  -spc

[1]	Not because Lua is too obtuse or has unfamiliar concepts, but mainly
	because they can't search for a known solution to a problem because
	of the lack of standard modules.  If someone wants to use
	networking, Python has a standard module for that.  Or for iterating
	through a folder.  Stuff that Lua lacks.