Lua-users standard libraries project: anyone game?

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

Following the release of a new standard libraries snapshot, I've rewritten
the Wiki pages

http://lua-users.org/wiki/StandardLibraries

and

http://lua-users.org/wiki/StandardLibraryProposal

to bring things up to date and reflect the work that has been done. To
emphasise this:

   * There are now about 20 modules totalling about 2000 lines of code,
     all of it documented in a luadoc-like fashion (I haven't yet settled
     on a satisfactory documentation tool, though a simple one is
     included)

   * The code is written in a consistent and clear style

   * You can get a recent and fairly stable snapshot from
     http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=32250

   * The libraries have been used in production code

   * There's lots of useful stuff from primitives for working with tables
     (e.g. inverting keys and values, making the list of keys or list of
     values), through a simple and powerful prototype-based object
     implementation, to a full-blown getopt module, a shell for writing
     small CLI programs, and a polymorphic implementation of the longest
     common subsequence algorithm---the sort of thing you might use to
     write diff.

I'm looking now for interest from three main classes of people:

1. Users. If the libraries are useless, tell me why. If they're buggy,
tell me what doesn't work. If they don't do what you want, tell me what
you want.

2. System integrators. I'm thinking of the Lua team and LuaCheia people
principally. Are these libraries useful with your distribution? If not,
why not? (I'm still not clear on why no Lua code is distributed with the
core distribution: it can be 100% portable, just like C code, and just as
useful and fundamental as the standard C libraries.)

3. Contributors. It's easy to add code to these libraries. I'm not
insisting on a particular layout or coding style (though that would be
nice); functionality is much more important. In particular, other than by
avoiding namespace clashes, I don't even think it's essential to make sure
that individual modules work well together (though in the long run it's
certainly desirable). I'd love to hear from anyone else who would like to
get involved (at the moment it's just me, John Belmonte and a few others
who've contributed code).

Thanks for listening!

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/ | The only person worth beating is yourself