Re: [OT] Wrote a Lua-extensible OSX window manager

[Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@...>]

Thanks!

1. I did try LuaJIT for easier ObjC integration, but vanilla Lua feels
cleaner to integrate with; and performance is not a very big issue
here.
2. Yeah, I used AwesomeWM for a while when I was using Linux; forgot
about that until now. It was one of my inspirations to try integrating
with Lua.
3. See this issue for a detailed explanation of why I threw the source
into my project: https://github.com/sdegutis/hydra/issues/22
4. Yep, my grandparents came from Lithuania :) my dad speaks it but I
don't know any.

-Steven


On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Ką Mykolas <kamicc@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nice work!
>
> Couple of observations:
>   - would You consider trying LuaJIT to squeeze even more performance from Lua?
>   - are You familiar with other Lua based Window Managers, as in Awesome WM?
>   - are You considering hacking Lua core (it's 5.2.3, I suppose),
> because it's added as source instead of submodule?
>
>   - offtopic: Your last name seems Lithuanian, am I right? :}
>
> - Kamiccolo
>
> On 7/2/14, Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> (Sorry if this is a double-post; the first message looks like all
>> jumbled text in the archive!)
>>
>> I recently chose Lua as the extension language for my OSX window
>> manager, Hydra. It's still in beta, and I hope to release 1.0 in about
>> a week, but you can browse the project on its github page:
>> https://github.com/sdegutis/hydra
>>
>> This project is my first real attempt at integrating Lua into an
>> application as an extension language, as well as my first time
>> seriously using Lua. The experience has been exceedingly pleasant so
>> far, and I'm very happy that I found Lua and gave it serious
>> consideration for this role.
>>
>> In fact, I've made a point of it to write only the bare minimum of the
>> application in C (really Objective-C), and to do as much as possible
>> in Lua. It's really been a lot easier than when I wrote it in
>> Objective-C. And I hope that it will be easier for others to
>> contribute to the project if it's all in Lua.
>>
>> Since it is my first attempt, the code in my project may not be
>> perfectly idiomatic, although I've been cleaning it up as I go along.
>> The folks in the #lua channel on freenode have also been tremendously
>> helpful in giving constructive criticism and feedback on my modules
>> and their design, and it's evolved quite a bit since I started, and I
>> think it landed in a good spot.
>>
>> The end result is an API that I hope is mostly idiomatic and easy to
>> use. The API can be easily browsed in the HTML form which I compiled
>> from within the app: http://sdegutis.github.io/hydra/
>>
>> One more thing that may be of note, is that I used a home-grown
>> documentation system, instead of the traditional JavaDoc-style system
>> that peruses comments. My system has a global `doc` which then mirrors
>> the rest of the API. And each node on this tree has a custom
>> __tostring metamethod which is useful in the REPL. This system was
>> used to generate the HTML documentation linked above, by first
>> translating this documentation tree into JSON. One of my favorite
>> benefits of this so far has been that I can still write the
>> documentation for a method right next to its implementation.
>>
>> Anyway, I just wanted to let this mailing list know about this
>> project, since it's Lua-related. Thanks for your time.
>>
>> -Steven
>>
>>
>