Re: Online Lua IDE - is it a good idea?

[Tim Caswell <tim@...>]

I would be lying if I said I have not already considered something
like this.  But it makes me smile that others have the same idea.

For those on the list who don't know me, I'm both the author of Luvit
(luvit.io) and work for Cloud9 (c9.io).

I've recently launched a couple node learning sites (nodebits.org, and
nodemanual.org).  While at the same time as trying to make the
developer story better for node.js developers, my evening hobby is
helping the luvit community grow.

I agree that a purely cloud-based ide as it exists today it rather
limiting.  I'm aware of the limitations and am working very hard to
make it useful for a broader range of tasks.  Some ideas include a
local version that runs offline, a way to possibly integrate with your
own vps, and some other neat ideas.  The situation is getting much
better.

I will say that luvit isn't ready to make something at large as the
infrastructure for c9.io.  Luvit (and lua) don't have a very robust
debugging system yet.  And luvit in particular is rather hard to debug
at the moment.  Expect to spend many hours with debug statements
littered throughout your code.  I'm confident this situation will
improve with time and eventually luvit will be a first class way to
write high-performance network servers using lua.

I try to not push Luvit too hard on this mailing list since it's
somewhat incompatible with stock lua, but I'll happly help with any
efforts in this area since it overlaps heavily with what I work on all
day.

-Tim Caswell


On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Alek Paunov <alex@declera.com> wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> C9 [1] based, but Lua/Luvit centric online IDE service?
>
> Would such a service be valuable for the Lua community, especially the
> module authors?
>
> As most of the List probably knows, the company behind the amazing C9
> project runs JS/Node.js centric IDE service at c9.io, which is implemented
> as integration of Github IDE sources with (closed source) infrastructure
> components.
>
> IMHO, some potential benefits would be:
>  * more easy start for beginners
>   * feature for choosing per-installed module-set profiles
>   * option to use/test with different Lua engines/Luvit/Tir
>  * Lua centric code search (across the projects in service)
>  * more appealing lua.org/demo replacement
>
> Of course such a big project will bring bunch of challenges - reliable
> hosting; per session containers (LXC or something); implementation of V8
> debugging protocol (which C9 uses for interactive debugging); etc. May be
> recent Koneki [2] bits would be of great help for Lua support in C9.
>
> Kind regards,
> Alek
>
> [1] https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9
>    High-quality in-browser IDE written in JS
>    (including node.js server side).
> [2] http://eclipse.org/koneki/ldt
> [3] http://repl.it
>