Re: Thought experiment: what would you remove from Lua

[Andrew Starks <andrew@...>]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 1:25 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, given that coroutines CAN be implemented in terms of other
language features, you could implement them at a higher level -- some
sort of automated source transformation at parse time so that the
VM/JIT/whatever doesn't have to worry about it. The _javascript_
community has done this for quite a while now in order to work around
lack of browser-side support, and while the generated code is really
hard to read it's definitely just mechanical.

/s/ Adam

I think that meta-programming is a useful boarder. Whenever you're adding language features into the language that you're programming, you're meta-programming. _javascript_s lack of a concurrency framework requires immense amounts of meta-programming and complexity.

Lua has this too, but mostly for extending existing mechanisms in particular directions: cqueues, object libraries and ad hoc type systems.

I think that wherever there is meta programming, it's good to ask why and evaluate whether it's not needed or should be part of the language.

--

Andrew Starks