Live data from Hacker News

LuaJIT uses rolling releases

freelists.org

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#41
post #38

I wish people wouldn't do this. It makes it very confusing to know when it makes sense to upgrade, and depending on your luck you'd be getting a version that has a bug fixed in the commit right after, but you wouldn't know because nobody announced a patch release. I get that release engineering adds a lot of overhead but it helps build a lot of trust between the developer and the user.

LuaJIT is in a very weird place overall. Some years ago, the main developer announced that they were stepping down. A bunch of forks sprang up as a result. Meanwhile, the main developer declined to put anyone else in charge of the project, and basically kept developing it on their own (albeit at a slower pace). The forks eventually died; no one was able to build enough momentum to keep a community going.

So this policy was basically where we were anyway. I'm glad the project hasn't died, and in my practical usage it's been very stable, so I haven't had trouble grabbing random development commits off the Git repo. My impression was the release process was very high overhead, and I'd rather that the main developer stick around to work on the code rather than leave due to burning out.

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#42
post #39

Cloudflare In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's existence and it's only been in the last couples of years they have begun to use Rust. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#43
post #39

Cloudflare In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's existence and it's only been in the last couples of years they have begun to use Rust. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.

Your opinion is not universal.

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#44
post #39

Cloudflare In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's existence and it's only been in the last couples of years they have begun to use Rust. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.

> "LuaJIT is a cool thing. Helped us a lot. But not everything remains the right thing forever."

Posted only 11 months ago by Cloudflare CTO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32869567

Cloudflare was already operating a scale and as public company, when they were running LuaJIT.

Chances that you'll operate at Cloudflare scale is like 1:Billion.

Sounds like Cloudflare was quite happy with LuaJIT.

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#45

Went to the site and could not find info about Lua version support, is LuaJIT still Lua5.1 only these days? I hope it can support newer versions, e.g. 5.4 etc.

maybe they should change the name

because to me this sounds like hoping linux can support newer versions of minix

or that openbsd can support newer versions of freebsd

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#46
post #3

> DO NOT use pseudo-releases or tarballs created by third parties. In particular, automatic tarballs made by GitHub and other mirrors are lacking the .git directory and will not properly build anymore. It's a little concerning that their build process relies on a .git directory being present. That's going to make it quite tough for packagers to actually package this.

yeah, obviously this isn't acceptable for things like debian, ubuntu, or guix

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#47
post #39

Cloudflare In case anyone is wondering how highly performant / scalable LuaJIT is - Cloudflare was built on top of LuaJIT for the first ~10 years of it's existence and it's only been in the last couples of years they have begun to use Rust. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/lua/

and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.

I like Lua the language, but why is it and LuaJIT terrible to work with in your experience?

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#48
post #10
post #3

> DO NOT use pseudo-releases or tarballs created by third parties. In particular, automatic tarballs made by GitHub and other mirrors are lacking the .git directory and will not properly build anymore. It's a little concerning that their build process relies on a .git directory being present. That's going to make it quite tough for packagers to actually package this.

I'm confused what you mean. What is a packager doing here? I always assumed that the intention of this library is that you, as a developer, compile and embed it in a product that needs a scripting engine. What use would a standalone LuaJIT package be?

if you apt install libluajit-5.1-dev you can compile and link your c programs with it without having to compile it yourself

similarly if you are writing programs in lua rather than in c you can run them in luajit if you just apt install luajit

if you want to release your programs as free software so other people can compile and link them, it's important for them to be able to get the version of luajit you were using so they can debug why your program doesn't work in the current version of luajit

Re: LuaJIT uses rolling releases

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and they don’t now for good reason. Lua and LuaJIT are terrible to work with.

I like Lua the language, but why is it and LuaJIT terrible to work with in your experience?

I haven't looked at LuaJIT, but Lua is written in this weird bastard language using the C preprocessor. All of the terseness of Lisp, with no type system (since it's the C preprocessor), and the added fun of pointer arithmetic.
Post reply on HN