RE: Mochalua - Lua for J2ME

["Patrick Meehan" <patrick@...>]

There's a .jar up now for anyone interested.

Re differences from the current version of Kahlua, I couldn't say.  When we first looked at what was out there it seemed like the implementation of Kahlua was pretty preliminary - the author was still thinking about how to do things like coroutines.  It looked like (as I recall) just the basic LVM.  I don't think it implemented much of the Lua API.

We commissioned Mochalua so we could port a mature C language code base we use internally, so the focus was on being fully featured.  It is intended to be an exhaustive port of everything but the compiler.  It's (slavishly) true to the C API - you should be able to just cut and paste your C language glue code, prefix it with the API classname and have it work.  We've ported (almost) the entire API, Lua libraries, debug libraries and LVM functionality (coroutines, etc.).  We even trap userdata going out of scope and call the __gc metamethod.  Mochalua also reports the standard Lua runtime errors with file name and line number in the same format as the C version.

Kahlua may have come a long way since we looked at earlier this year; once we committed to doing our own port, we didn't look back.

Anyway, at the very least Mochalua is another Lua implementation for people to consider.  I should also mention that it includes a J2ME port of a lot of the C standard libraries to support the Lua libraries - math.h, printf, etc.  It was written for J2ME, but can certainly be retargetted for any Java project - there should be nothing inside of the Mochalua source that requires or expects a Midlet to run.

-----Original Message-----
From: lua-bounces@bazar2.conectiva.com.br [mailto:lua-bounces@bazar2.conectiva.com.br] On Behalf Of David Manura
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 5:48 PM
To: lua@bazar2.conectiva.com.br
Subject: Re: Mochalua - Lua for J2ME

> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Patrick Meehan wrote:
> > I'd like to announce the release of Mochalua, a J2ME port of the Lua 
> > runtime and API, as open source under the MIT license.

This is now on the Lua Implementations page[1], but could you elaborate on the differences between Mochalua[2] and Kahlua[3]?

[1] http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaImplementations
[2] http://code.google.com/p/mochalua/
[3] http://code.google.com/p/kahlua/