Motivated by the recent discussions about python and lua rocks and by personal dissatisfaction with the C++ standard library. With inflammatory title because we all see a few thousand emails a day.
The standard library is where code goes to die. Design mistakes are locked in forever as breaking users code is noisily unpopular. A better, faster or safer API must coexist with the existing ones, which generally chose good names for themselves.
Think of the problems we have with version changes, not least the unfortunate divergence from luajit, and imagine scaling that to the size of python's blessed library set. With reference to the undying 2.7.
I don't use luarocks. Bad experiences with pip and npm, and to some extent aptitude, have left me wary. So instead I bake libuv, sqlite, penlight and some other stuff into the lua interpreter. I'm pretty sure that's better than the search the directory tree / www and trust to luck that other ecosystems use.
I would urge caution when importing design choices from elsewhere. Most languages do it worse than lua does for basically all instances of 'it'.
Thanks all
Jon
