Re: TechRepublic article about languages to avoid in 2018

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

On 7 March 2018 at 15:23, Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:
> 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.
>

I think the stand taken by Mike Pall to not break ABI compatibility is
a reasonable one. This is the fundamental building block of so much
code in the world; people rely on this day in day out. I fear a
failure to understand how important this is one of the mistakes in
Lua.

> 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.
>

I think you are mistaken. In fact, Lua is maintained by one man
(Roberto) whereas LuaJIT has regular and sometimes large contributions
from external contributors. Mike Pall also appears to fix any bugs
very quickly. If he is not spending a lot of time enhancing LuaJIT,
that is not necessarily a problem as it is a mature product.

> 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.
>

I think this is wishful thinking as LuaJIT is probably not going away
anywhere soon.


Regards
Dibyendu