Re: co-routines [was Re: Unicode]

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> - is there a page describing the short/mid-term plans with Lua?

No. Currently, our short-term plans are only better support for co-routines 
and multi-threading, and "names for tags". Both involve small changes in 
the code, and are completely downward compatible with Lua 4.0.

Our most important mid-term plan is "consolidation and growth of a common 
core and user base" ;-) That means adding libraries and tools to Lua, 
instead of changing the language. 

I, personally, have a mid-term plan of finnishing the book about Lua;
for that I also need a stable language ;-)


> - do you accept patches with feature changes (if deemed useful)?

Yes (if deemed useful).

> - is lua-l a suitable place to start feature/language discussions?

Yes. But keep in mind that, despite the big change in its API for version 
4.0, Lua has been a quite stable language, and we plan to be more and
more "conservative". 

We really prefer when people (and ourselves ;-) direct their efforts to 
improving Lua, without changing it. Examples include porting it to
"difficult" platforms (such as EPOC and PalmOS), libraries, tools
(such as ToLua), etc. There is no shortage of things to be done.

One of the main goals of Lua is to be "an extensible extention language"; 
someone described it as a "kit for building domain specific languages". 
So, another interesting area for Lua is changing the language for
specific tasks without changing its implementation. A good example of
that is LuaOrb, that transforms Lua into a scripting language for CORBA.
It uses a "stock" version of Lua 3.2, modified through its "official"
ways (tag methods).

-- Roberto