Re: Why I leave Lua (Was: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available)

Subject: Re: Why I leave Lua (Was: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available)
From: Alex Queiroz &lt;asandroq@ ... &gt;
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:03:37 +0200

Hallo,

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 9:00 AM, Tim Mensch <tim-lua-l@bitgems.com> wrote:

I think there's a danger in stock Lua going in directions where Mike Pall doesn't want to follow; I'm sure I'm not the only one who cares about speed and stability, and the farther PUC Lua is from LuaJIT, the less relevant PUC Lua is to people like me. [1]

It would be interesting if LuaJIT became its own language, changed name, and finally split. The user bases are not really the same: Lua has always been and will always be for embedding in as many platforms as possible. When looked from this point of view everything that PUC does makes sense. If your software embeds Lua 5.1 or Lua 5.2, it can continue to do so for several years until you decide to upgrade and make all the relevant changes, maybe even skipping versions.

The fact that many people like Lua as a stand-alone language is a happy side-effect.

Cheers,

Alex Silva