Re: Lua distros again

[Pierre Chapuis <catwell@...>]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018, at 17:51, Milind Gupta wrote:

Only for Lua as a possible replacement for Python. The future of Lua

lies where the past of Lua also lies, as a scripting language embedded

in an application, not as the backbone of standalone applications.

I think this may be a false hope. Even though Lua is extremely good at that I have failed to convince popular (in my domain) open source software to use that as their scripting language when they decided they want to add one.

We have gone way off topic here but since we are talking about convincing people to choose Lua instead of Python for an embedded language, here are some arguments that worked for me.

- Security is a good one. Lua is much, much easier to sandbox than Python. Also, should you ever audit the source, it's 16,000 lines of C. Good luck auditing CPython.

- Open Source references. Yes, there are some projects that use Python. But they aren't OpenResty, Redis, HAProxy, nmap, wireshark, VLC, Asterisk, OpenWRT, PowerDNS, RPM, the NetBSD kernel...

Every year we hear of large Open Source projects successfully embedding Lua. For instance a friend of mine added it to the neomutt MUA last year: https://www.neomutt.org/2017/04/29/lua A few days ago at FOSDEM there was this talk about a Lua plugin for Janus, a WebRTC server: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/janus