Much of Adobe Lightroom is written in it, right?
Their plugin SDK is exclusively Lua I think. In fact I'm looking for someone to build one for us. Contact me if you're interested.
Why nobody talks about Lua
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#42I have trouble finding a use for Lua, even though I like it better as a language than most. The problem is that it isn't a good "starting place" for an app. Instead you write something in C/C++ and say "oh, I wish I had a dynamic language for this part" and then you add Lua on top. And this is part of why Lua is such a compelling language now - by being extension-focused it's been able to iterate the entire language…
>Lua still doesn't really satisfy as a "batteries-included" platform. This is exactly the problem, imo. Lua is a niche language because its benefits only apply to a certain niche, i.e., scripting glue on top of an extant system, because that's where the time investment makes sense. Is Lua so much better that using it is worth losing the convenience of something like Rails or Django? Those things come all bundled up n…
you need to realize lua isnt targeted as a batteries included platform, its design philosophy is minimalist, not junk included but customize for your requirements. where lua absolutely excels is when paired with C (not C++) and not used as "scripting glue" but fully integrated and driving the system. it really appeals to minimalistic / keep it simple philosophy guys which isnt the web community.
lua is not a one stop shop and will never be, which probably why it flys under the radar so much - you cant stamp a powered by lua logo on it.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#43I started using Lua as an embedded scripting language to drive a pretty complicated process. After a few weeks, i ended up switching to Python. The Lua libraries were pretty weak, the datastructures and builtin functions were wierd and inconsistent, and swig+python made for much faster scripting then exposing c interfaces to lua.
Oh, and the lack of an integer type seemed to make it really difficult to do proper bit shifting--i'd expect this to be the bread and butter of an embedded scripting language.
you apply the bit operator patch to get this.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#44I started using Lua as an embedded scripting language to drive a pretty complicated process. After a few weeks, i ended up switching to Python. The Lua libraries were pretty weak, the datastructures and builtin functions were wierd and inconsistent, and swig+python made for much faster scripting then exposing c interfaces to lua.
You can use SWIG with Lua.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python and Ruby largely continue the class-based object oriented model and are thus easy to pick up if you come from a C++/Java background. While JavaScript is prototype-based, and thus somewhat exotic, it at least maintains the syntactic heritage of C/C++, so it's not as scary as it otherwise might be for beginners. Plus most in the web development background have already known the language for years. Perhaps the re…
_why wrote a web server in lua, just for fun. It's available as a lua rock (like a ruby gem or python egg).
My bad. I had a brain fart. He wrote a web framework (not server) for Io, not Lua.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#46Just installed it, `sudo apt-get install lua50`. It's 352kB - smaller than most unix utilities.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#47Just installed it, `sudo apt-get install lua50`. It's 352kB - smaller than most unix utilities.
Why not `sudo apt-get install lua5.1`? 5.0 is rather old.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#48I have trouble finding a use for Lua, even though I like it better as a language than most. The problem is that it isn't a good "starting place" for an app. Instead you write something in C/C++ and say "oh, I wish I had a dynamic language for this part" and then you add Lua on top. And this is part of why Lua is such a compelling language now - by being extension-focused it's been able to iterate the entire language…
If the app you need to script is C++ there are much more appealing options than Lua, which is very C. You get ugly C style code in your C++. QScript, ChaiScript, and projects like boost.python and libperl++, play much better with your C++.
If you need boost.python-esque interface for Lua, use Luabind.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, and the lack of an integer type seemed to make it really difficult to do proper bit shifting--i'd expect this to be the bread and butter of an embedded scripting language.
you apply the bit operator patch to get this.
You do not apply bit operator patch, you do use bitop library.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#50I started using Lua as an embedded scripting language to drive a pretty complicated process. After a few weeks, i ended up switching to Python. The Lua libraries were pretty weak, the datastructures and builtin functions were wierd and inconsistent, and swig+python made for much faster scripting then exposing c interfaces to lua.
Lua data structures and builtin functions are ones of the most consistent sort I've seen around — if you get the whole picture.
They are just a bit unorthodoxal.