Most of language requests and proposals appear to come from a few vocal individuals.
I think this is true of many things in life and the Lua team has picked a wise course of action regarding contributions. Who was quoting Bruce Lee lately?
The vast majority of Lua users do not voice an opinion and are probably not even on the list.
Do you agree?
I speculate that the vast majority of Lua users are writing scripts for games. There are literally millions of kids playing games that are scripted in Lua.
I was using the Roblox Studio IDE and it's beautiful. Really slick autocomplete. Writing scripts in Roblox and the questions kids are asking on the various forums are in a different category than the questions I see on this list. Those kids aren't interested in language semantics (though I am now understanding what Soni is onto with Cratera), they need help with the game API and technical issues.
Most games are still using a 5.1 API. Just to mix posts, Cloud Wu pointed out the possible memory footprint improvements for large servers. I can't help but wonder if GC and performance improvements were directed at coercing new games to use 5.4. For some time I have wondered why I don't see more game and game engine people posting on this forum but perhaps the 5.1/5.x schism is why? I assume that these large companies are in contact with the Lua team and the engine implementers' would be well known in the Lua community *somewhere*.
Personally I just really like Lua. Its refreshing coming home from a day job slinging Java or C# and writing some nice little scripts that do the same thing with no threads and 1/10th the memory. I have to admit to myself thought that I spend more time opining on the mailing list and trying to build some weird library than I do scripting. But that's why I'm on the list, to find those fun libraries and learn about the language semantics. Each to their own. :)
