Re: Lua and other languages compared (pros and cons) [Was: LuaJIT without the JIT?]

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 7:17 AM, HyperHacker <hyperhacker@gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess the point of this message is Lua is awesome and big thanks to
> everyone who made it possible. :D

Amen to that!

For me the sweet spot currently is to use Lua with the JVM.  Lovely
for making GUIs, access to all those Java libraries without needing to
write bindings.[1]  One of the nicest presents you can give to a big
Java program is Lua scripting, even if it's just to give it a REPL for
manipulating it from inside.

That being said, LuaJava has some problems - calling any Java APIs
from within coroutines is broken, which is a big one. But Jason Santos
and myself are going to revisit it later this year. [2]

steve d.

[1] unless the reflection overhead is unacceptable. But as usual, measure first!
[2] there are pure Java implementations of Lua out there, good if
purity is necessary, but they tend to be slow and harder to use.