On Tue, 28 Jan 2020 at 16:43, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
<lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> Could you please comment on what the results mean. Any surprises? Any
> points on which to focus attention?
the thing that surprised me is the popularity of Lua 5.1 The usual
answer is because of LuaJIT stagnation, but Lua5.1 bars are
significantly higher than LuaJIT's so i'm not sure it's the main
reason.
maybe it's commonly considered a "good enough" version and so there's
little pressure to update? or is there any big application that uses
it and tips the scale?
what doesn't surprise is the low score of Lua5.2 I think 5.3 is much
more attractive.
--
Javier
Noteworthy games using Lua 5.1: World of Warcraft, Roblox, CryEngine, FCEUX
Noteworthy non-games using Lua 5.1: Adobe Lightroom, Autodesk 3ds Max, Wireshark
Another point of consideration is that 5.1 was the main Lua release for almost six years. 5.2 lasted less than three and never generated any noteworthy hype while bringing a controversial compatibility break along with it, effectively giving 5.1 additional time in the spotlight. The fact that LuaJIT was drop-in compatible with 5.1 meant that targeting 5.1 was an even better idea.
The fact that the common language subset shared among the whole 5.x series (including LuaJIT) is so big also means that many developers are still going to target 5.1 and eschew the newer features for the sake of compatibility, which further bumps 5.1's penetration -- if you count projects that can support multiple Lua versions, you would expect the oldest common version to have the largest base.
And for big commercial projects, there's little incentive to bother upgrading -- if it ain't broke, and all that.
/s/ Adam
