Re: Lua on googles app engine?

[Javier Guerra Giraldez <javier@...>]

On Saturday 20 September 2008, Kriss@XIXs.com wrote:
> 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.

it would certainly be a great alternative.  compared to Python it has far 
better performance (and a great JIT!), and it's much easier to sandbox.  
also, since the available libraries aren't so extensive and standardised, it 
doesn't feel so bad when limited in the way that Google needs to make it 
easily distributable.

yeah, lots of people are asking for PHP and Perl.  other languages are 
mentioned too, but i'm not sure if they have much traction.

the languages accepted for internal development at Google are C++ (with heavy 
use of STL), Java and Python, and JavaScript for specific things (their 
client-side development is a Java to JS compiler!).

so, i'd guess they would start with javascript (V8?), then Java and quite 
possibly some form of sanitised C++.

Another data point is their choice of frameworks, heavily leaning to Django. 
it's a really good framework, but they had to severely mutilate it to make it 
behave with their ad-hoc database system.  Django is very Python oriented, 
just creating a Lua binding wouldn't do any good.  also, since it's written 
in Python, it doesn't make too much sense either.

but creating a Django-like framework in Lua would be a nice thing, 
independently of making it to Google servers.

-- 
Javier

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