OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/20279/The_A-Z_of_Programming_Languages_Lua Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:13:20 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Lovely read! http://osnews.com/thread?330101 http://osnews.com/thread?330101 Wow, Roberto Ierusalimschy sounds really like a relaxed and contented hacker. I loved this interview. Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (boudewijn) Comments Comment by dindin http://osnews.com/thread?330103 http://osnews.com/thread?330103 I guess that even a GPL-like license would hurt its spread.

This i agree with. We would not have used it (and contributed) if not for the liberal license. But may not be everyone's choice. Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dindin) Comments Wowza http://osnews.com/thread?330109 http://osnews.com/thread?330109 Could computer world fit more ads into their site? I don't think i've seen a site where the content is 1/5 the page and 4/5ths is all ads like that. To bad the article is a pretty decent one. Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Linwood) Comments RE: Wowza http://osnews.com/thread?330125 http://osnews.com/thread?330125 I hear you. Sites like that ( and Computer World is far from being unique in this regard ) irritate me.

Try clicking the "Print this story" on the right - it'll
take you to http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1028768484;fp;;fpid;;p... which only has a single ad box. Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bannor99) Comments next version http://osnews.com/thread?330153 http://osnews.com/thread?330153 Lua is a great binding language, and I'm impressed the lua guys are willing to drop things from the language and streamline it without regards to backcompat between major versions.

I'd love for 6 to clean up (and i know it will never happen) and use 0 indexing instead of 1 indexeing.

It also needs a better C api for table manipulation. Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (_df_) Comments Mixed feelings about lua.. http://osnews.com/thread?330157 http://osnews.com/thread?330157 On the plus side, it's a very, very fast language. We use it as scripting for game development. The table model makes it incredibly flexible.
On the negative side, there's a couple things I don't like about it.
First, I know you can use fallbacks to make"your own object model" but i think this is a double edged sword, as it requires more hacking and it slows down the language overall.

Second, I wish it had local scoping by default, not global. I understand that by forcing you to write "local", the "compiler" can use temporaries/indices instead of strings and run faster overall, but it's still annoying.

Third, while the ada-like syntax is not that bad, I find that having to be capable at two different kind of syntaxes at the same time (specially when it needs "end", and more specially having indexing begin at 1) is annoying and I believe based more on an academic decision than practice, where you are actually binding from C.

Fourth, I find the incremental GC method more difficult to keep track of than using refcounts+cycle collector.

I have found that "squirrel" as a language, solves most of my shortcomings with lua (being based on it), as it's like a more real-world usage oriented version of it. Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (reduz) Comments RE: Mixed feelings about lua.. http://osnews.com/thread?330166 http://osnews.com/thread?330166 are squirrel performance similar? Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sanctus) Comments RE[2]: Mixed feelings about lua.. http://osnews.com/thread?330169 http://osnews.com/thread?330169 last time I looked at it, lua was faster than squirrel. Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (_df_) Comments mod_wombat in progress... http://osnews.com/thread?330181 http://osnews.com/thread?330181 I had been really interested in using Lua for web applications a couple years ago, and was disappointed by the lack of a decent Apache 2 module. And the old mod_lua for Apache 1.x was not being maintained.

Yes, I am aware there is Kepler and a couple other solutions, but I need deployment through Apache for a number of reasons.

Anyway, I was happy to read that there is a new Apache module in progress: mod_wombat - http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/mod_wombat/

Here's the developer's website: http://kasparov.skife.org/blog/src/wombat/

The info is pretty minimal at present, and to read the documentation you have to browse /docs in the source, but it looks like they are approaching it the right way. Here is some more information: http://luanova.org/category/mod_wombat/ and here is a small presentation by the developer: http://kasparov.skife.org/wombat_ac_us_07.pdf Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rycamor) Comments Debian/kSolaris http://osnews.com/thread?330184 http://osnews.com/thread?330184 If they like Debian so much and want to use some parts of OpenSolaris, why didn't they just start a Debian/kSolaris project ? Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Lennie) Comments RE: Mixed feelings about lua.. http://osnews.com/thread?330198 http://osnews.com/thread?330198

I have found that "squirrel" as a language, solves most of my shortcomings with lua (being based on it), as it's like a more real-world usage oriented version of it.


oh the irony Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (axel) Comments RE: Debian/kSolaris http://osnews.com/thread?330282 http://osnews.com/thread?330282 GNU libc port means => no Zones, no ZFS, no SMF, no anything.. Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (erast) Comments RE: mod_wombat in progress... http://osnews.com/thread?330316 http://osnews.com/thread?330316 I can attest first hand that mod_wombat rocks.
I have made 3 websites with it (http://netpim.info/ (an online PIM), http://mailcatch.com/ (a temporary inbox service) and http://www.maxiblingbling.com/ (a lottery site, in french) ).
Mod_wombat does indeed rock for web coding, it is light, fast and plain out of the way. While it is still young it is already quite good.
I was using Xavante (from Kepler) before proxied by a front-end apache, but performance was subpar, now with wombat I dont have any problems ;) Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (DarkGod) Comments