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Hi Patrick,

On 10/02/2012 7:56 AM, Patrick wrote:

Now this is not very interesting but what about Lua size 4, the
community edition? Why not make a bigger, slower, more feature rich Lua
that the general community could develop.

Perhaps this would end, the endless discussions about what is missing or
wrong with Lua, whatever was missing could be added to the
design-by-committee version and the Lua team could focus on the version
they want to work on with just a few smaller sizes pre-compiled for
convenient number types.


As a Lua embedder I have a couple of thoughts on this:
First, the down side: I would never use the community edition because if I wanted something bloated like that I would use Python (which I use all the time as a scripting language but wouldn't consider embedding these days).
Second: on the other hand, I think a community edition would have some advantages even for my use-case. For example, at the moment there is no single standard library for Lua. This means if you want (say) container classes, you have to write them yourself or cobble together something out of a combination of other projects. That's fine, but it means that everyone who embeds Lua may end up with a different combinations/versions of what really should be the same "standard" stuff. I'm not saying that everyone needs (e.g.) a "stack" type, but for those who do, they should probably all be using the same one. Without this Lua scripting skills (and scripts) arn't very transportable between systems that embed it. I think centralising standard library development in a community edition could help with that -- even though I wouldn't use the community edition myself, I'd bundle some of the modules. I'd feel much better about bundling a set of "official" modules from the community edition than bundling a bunch of random stuff from all round the net.
Same goes for object models -- would be nice to have some ordained "standard" or "reference" ones.
Whether this can be achieved within the required constraints I don't really know. Maybe there are too many conflicting (but equally valid) aproaches to have a single unified "official" community edition. 

Just my two cents,

Ross.