Re: Thought experiment: what would you remove from Lua

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 at 17:08, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Op Sa., 8 Sep. 2018 om 14:33 het Dibyendu Majumdar
> <mobile@majumdar.org.uk> geskryf:
> >
> > On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 at 06:27, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On the other hand, unlike Dibyendu and Paige, writing and supporting
> > > dialects of Lua is not my hobby. (Btw Dibyendu, if you need a name for
> > > this stripped-down Lua of yours, how about Deimos? For over 100 years,
> > > it was the smallest known moon in the universe.)
> > >
> >
> > Nice name. I think there is a smaller language / implementation
> > lurking inside Lua that might be more efficient and optimizable. The
> > problem as always is of compatibility - and the fact that it is very
> > very hard to establish a new language. It requires full time attention
> > and many years of effort. The amount of time I am able to give to Ravi
> > for example, is insufficient to do this. And the difficulty then of
> > popularizing it makes it hard to be motivated.
>
> Actually Lua is so minimalistic, the question is always what one could
> add rather than what could one remove, and the answer in both cases
> can usually be implemented by loading a package.
>

Sure, if you aren't interested in performance.

As someone trying to build an efficient JIT for Lua, I do wish I could
do away with some things that broadly speaking:

* Lead to lots of runtime type checking - such as metamethods, Integer subtype
* Unpredictable stack manipulation - via C api, or debug api
* Coroutines
* Need to support inheritance via metatables

I haven't kept of list of issues that I would like to address - these
are off the top of my head.

I think a language that had none of these features (but was otherwise
Lua) would still be very powerful. Difficulty is getting anyone to
adopt a new language.