Re: [FYI] ActiveState seems to be planning their own binary lua distribution

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 11:30 AM, Ralf Bisges <lua@bisges.net> wrote:

Hi to all!

I stumbled over a piece of information that may be of interest to some on the list:

Active State is planning to create / maintain their own binary lua distribution
(for Windows in this case).

https://www.activestate.com/lua

They even do some sort of advertising and praising :-)

Hi, 

ActiveState popped onto this mailing list a couple of months back (closer to a year or more?)  and Actively Stated (tee hee) they're planned support. They were going to add Lua to their proprietary editor that's based on Scite. I found out the other day that Scite has been updated to Lua5.3 and when I dug a little in the release notes, it looked like they're the ones that fixed it (I could be wrong). Other than that, there has been no more updates from them about the project. 

I wonder if ActiveState read the StackOverflow survey and decided against supporting Lua? (That's just a joke Ralf, there has been much discussion about Lua being declared "flat/dead/dying" and a "language to avoid" by various surveys and corporate shrills).

If you're looking for a low-investment Lua binary on Windows 10, consider my WinLua project: https://github.com/winlua/bin

If you can live with the license date for Lua being incorrect, the current 1803a release has been working well for me. I'm using it to build a cross platform LuaRocks GUI in Qt: https://github.com/WinLua/BrokenGlass-PM with the help of the sol2 C++ wrapper.

Short self introduction:

I'm following the list for quite a while but this is my first post.

I only used lua once yet (recently for a conversion of >50 MB of XML-Export from
a huge control system into the structure of a control system from a different
manufacturer) and was very satisfied by the speed and ease of it.

Being a self-employed professional programmer for more than 30 years now, I read
about lua and wanted to have a try, whenever the choice of tool was mine.

I originally learned programming with Wang Basic in high school around 1977 and
later had to use Fortran/Assembler/Machine language/C/C++. It was mostly on
embedded systems, in the last maybe 15 years under the OS QNX. Most of my work
has to do with remote controlling in Germany and the surrounding countries.

Lua is a great choice for embedded systems. I picked Lua because I can assemble it as I like and it will work on very small and very large target systems. I used Lua to create a proof of concept websocket client and server that works on FreeBSD using lua-http (and cqueues) for communicating with my arm boards (IMX6 and Beaglebone/Ti). Lua can be used as a stand alone language, or be embedded into other languages to provide dynamic functionality which makes it great for extending existing C/C++ applications. 

Pretty much any tool that you need in Lua is available but you have to build your toolbox yourself. LuaRocks is the best package manager for Lua right now in my opinion as the others are out of date somewhat. I am by no means an experienced Lua programmer, but I would recommend starting with Penlight as it provides a "standard library" that's quite complete for most usages I've found. I made the mistake of assembling a toolkit myself before being familiar enough with Penlight. I would have been much further along if I had started with Penlight and then branched out as my use cases outstrtipped the library. Again, that's just opinion.

Anyway, welcome. Lua is a great language and is by no means dead, regardless of what the web developers that answer StackOverflow surveys say.

Cheers, 

Russ

 

Cheers

-- RB