Re: Is Lua the next big thing?

[Doug Rogers <rogers@...>]

Brent Fulgham wrote:

> The main advantages for Python:
> 1.  Customer base *might* be more likely to know it.
> 2.  Other developers are familiar with Python already.
> 3.  The existing NumPy and similar libraries are attractive for our use
> in a scientific analysis role.
> The main advantages for Lua:
> 1.  Small runtime.
> 2.  Wonderful theoretical foundation.
> 3.  Seems like it might be very easy to embed and extend.

I'm in the middle of a fairly heavy scientific port at the moment and
I'm already using Lua as a configuration and file input extension, so I
went looking for matrix/vector functions for Lua.

I found a NetLib wrapper package for Lua called Numerical Lua which is
hosted at Lua Forge: http://numlua.luaforge.net/. It's beta, but my
initial testing indicated that it worked for the things I needed (though
it took me a while to figure out how to use it - documentation is what's
missing). The key insight was to use 'matrix({{1,2,3},{...}})' to create
matrices. It has a nicer license than GSL, an alternative for which I
was considering writing a wrapper.

I'm under tight schedule pressure, but I hope to be able to get it
integrated and to give back to the project.

Doug

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