Lua on googles app engine?

["Kriss@..." <Kriss@...>]

Hello,

I was skimming through the documentation to google app engine
http://code.google.com/appengine/ and it occurred to me that lua might
be the easiest alternative to python to add to it. After mulling it
over for a while I decided to run the idea by this mailing list.

If you look at the user requests there are plenty of please add
support for language X here, however no one wants lua which is why I'm
posting to here to see if we might be able to drum up a bit of
interest. This would need interest since although I think technically
it wouldn't be that hard the main problem is convincing google to add
the support on their side.

First off let me just say that I have only skimmed through the issue,
I may be completely wrong about everything and it may be much more
complicated than it looks, please do not hesitate to disagree with me
vehemently.

The app engine is written in python and uses sandboxed python scripts
to service web requests. It provides a copy of the server code base
for local testing that I think could be easily modified to support lua
as an alternative to these sandboxed python scripts. However having
done that the real problem is to convince google that it should accept
these mods onto its servers.

Lunatic Python provides a python to lua bridge http://labix.org/lunatic-python

It looks like just wrapping the exposed python interface neatly into
lua is all that would be necessary to get lua scripts running, the
main issue would be maintaining the sand boxing and killing off of
intensive lua tasks. Nothing impossible just something to be careful
about.

My main reason for thinking that coding and lobbying for the change
might be a good idea is that it would help to increase the visibility
of lua as a web server side language and provide free/cheap hosting
for any web apps written in lua.

Nothing against python here, I just prefer lua as a personal preference.

Personally I'm currently running/developing a small web game/virtual
world server written in lua (metaplace.com has also chosen to use lua
server side) and I think using lua server side has many advantages. So
lua support in googles app engine is on my radar as it would mean I
could easily share some of this code and offload some work onto
googles app engine servers I don't have any actual need to do this, it
just seems like a nice option to have that might be useful in the
future.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this subject?

I think lua is in a unique position here where it would be technically
easy to add it but there are no users demanding it, which is the
opposite of adding say php which people are demanding but I suspect
would be much harder to implement.


-- 
Kriss

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