Re: TechRepublic article about languages to avoid in 2018

[Pierre Chapuis <catwell@...>]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018, at 04:34, Mason Bogue wrote:

> The trouble is that the Lua ecosystem has become so fragmented after
> 5.1. The changes in 5.2/5.3 seem to have been very unpopular and split
> people among three versions.

For the most part they were not unpopular with users, they were
unpopular with the LuaJIT implementer. At the time of 5.2 I suppose
the extent to which this would become a problem was not well
understood.

> There were always legacy programs written
> in old Lua versions, but today people even start new projects in old
> versions.

Not only that, people write code that assumes it runs on LuaJIT and
uses the FFI anyway...

> Some collaboration between the LuaJIT team and the PUC Lua
> team will probably be necessary if the issue is ever to be resolved.
> Unfortunately, this seems more unlikely than ever.

I think it's more likely that it was when LuaJIT was maintained by
a single person. I don't keep my hopes up though.

Here is a scenario I think could happen though: LuaJIT dies for
lack of proper maintenance and one of its forks (e.g. RaptorJIT)
rises from its ashes, with a maintainer who cares about this issue.

However, what I see as the most likely outcome is that the Lua
community will accept that LuaJIT is a different language, and
maybe that the use of another language (C, Terra, Titan...) is the
right solution to performance issues.

> Also, Google project announcements do not mean much. Many are "20%
> projects" that die within two years. See e.g. unladen-swallow.

Flutter is hardly this kind of project. It is Google's answer to Facebook's
React Native, and marketed as a recommended way to build Android
applications. I think Google is dedicating significant resources to it.

-- 
Pierre Chapuis