Re: Microsoft DLR and Lua?

["Fabio Mascarenhas" <mascarenhas@...>]

There are semantic mismatches between the DLR and Lua, mostly in the varargs and multi-values department, but also on tail calls, and Lua-style coroutines. The DLR as it is now is fairly flexible on the points where the four languages below have semantic differences, but that is not the case when they agree. But considering the maturity of the platform (basically it's in the anything can change stage yet) that's to be expected. In the future, maybe (especially if Microsoft becomes more open to open source contributions; its developers can't even read the source code of those languages!).

Lua on the CLR is another matter, though, and very doable (although coroutines are still a pain, but possible). And I'm working on that right now. :-) Oh, and about the DLR again, a Lua compiler *could* be implemented, but I believe it would perform badly. But if Silverlight/Moonlight gains traction, and there is no other way...

--

Fabio Mascarenhas

On 6/30/07, Erik Cassel < erik@roblox.com> wrote:

Has anybody been thinking about Microsoft's DLR?  It will be part of Silverlight. Lua sounds like an excellent language for this kind of thing. Imagine Flash on steroids with Lua in place of clunky ActionScript!

 

Apparently there are Python, _javascript_, Visual Basic and Ruby implementations already built on top of DLR.

 

Of course, this might require a complete re-implementation of the language. Also, Lua generally prides itself in being small, self-contained, pure C, etc, etc.  Still, I think it is intriguing…

 

Here are some links:

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2007/04/30/a-dynamic-language-runtime-dlr.aspx

 

http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV02&disc=&id=1511&year=2007&search=DEV02

 

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070430-microsoft-reveals-dynamic-language-runtime-for-net.html

 

Your thoughts?

 

-Erik Cassel