because your comments about embedded systems where a filename in a
Actually you are right. The company I work for manufactures microcontrollers and MEMS sensors. I would like to push for Lua to be used in embedded system. (if I were marketing I would say "Lua on the edge, as well as Lua on the cloud").
I have analyzed the relatively old eLua project (which was exceptional in many ways, but seems to have been forgotten). Fairness requires that I make a comparison against possible alternatives such as uPython or JerryScript (which seems to be still well maintained).
As much as I like Lua instinctively, there are few things that makes me uncertain (I would say "red flags" but I do not want to scare anyone) - these things have been discussed extensively in this mailing list and on website and I do not want to steal too much of your time, however just to summarize
1) Lua had LuaJIT, so it was the easiest and fastest scripting language, yet it did not became as widespread as it could be (Python did), this created the Lua51-because-it-is-LuaJIT-compatible vs Lua53-which-it-is-not, and now Lua54 is coming and there is the possibility to un-focus people on yet another version which for some reason does not dominate
2) Executables/Libraries: the official site
lua.org let's you download the lua binary, uLua/LuaRocks let you download the Lua binary and libraries but it is competing with LuaPower, but there are too many links to old/dead projects (LuaDist, LuaForWindows, AwosomeLua, list is long), and it is too easy to download a dll which cannot be used with your Lua installation because of naming conventions (which is why I learned how to recompile by myself what I need)
3) Documentation is great (as an example
https://stevedonovan.github.io/lua-5.1.4/ and the reference manual and the book from Lua creator which I bought) but in some case is not up to date - as an example see the discussion on how hash table works in current release happened just here few days ago (I implemented the old hash tables, "Brent", just to understand them better); to reconstruct the history is possible but takes time (I have read the all archive since the inception), sometime choices could be better justified (see the recent local-vs-global discussion).
Lua was so easy to learn and use that for me it is Lua-or-nothing. Thank you for letting me ask question in the mailing list. I hope I will be able to give back to this community by contributing in terms of code.
Andrea
