Re: Lua on cell phones

[Matt Campbell <mattcampbell@...>]

Mike Pall wrote:
>   Binding to C libraries is the forte of Lua.

Agreed.  WIthin a few days of first learning Lua in late 2004, I was 
writing bindings for Win32 API functions and COM interfaces 
(specifically, interfaces that didn't derive from IDispatch and thus 
couldn't be used via LuaCOM).  This collection of bindings, which I call 
LuaWin, has grown quite large; I may someday release it as open source 
(with my employer's permission).  I think much of it would be portable 
to Windows Mobile.

The flipside is that since there are relatively few bindings available 
for Lua, you may be writing a lot of them yourself.  That has certainly 
been the case in my use of Lua.

>   (how many refcounting bugs do your Python bindings have?).

That's why I've mostly used Pyrex for my Python bindings, even though 
Pyrex is quite clumsy for some tasks.

I suppose Lua's chief competitor on high-end phones is JavaScript.  JS 
has one obviously specific advantage:  many more programmers already 
know it.  So how do various JS implementations stack up on the points 
you've discussed?  The three I'm most interested in are Apple's 
open-source JavaScriptCore (which I'm sure they're using on the iPhone), 
Microsoft JScript (whatever version Windows Mobile is using e.g. in IE), 
and Tamarin (the new one based on Adobe's current ActionScript VM).

Matt

P.S. That list looks exhaustive to me.