Hi,
I love Lua - thank you all. This is the language I recommend to anyone wanting to learn to code - my copy of PIL has been a great tutorial. There are great development environments available in SciTE or Zerobrane, and a nice friendly community.
Lua is well suited to the "non-compiling user", as are many other interpreted languages. The popularity of these scripted languages is in part the ability to use them without learning/maintaining a compiler. However, there is a ceiling to what can be achieved with Lua alone and from that point onwards you need compiled libraries aka "Batteries" (lfs, winapi, rex_pcre, clipboard, afx, lpeg, hunspell, lsqlite, vcl, gslshell). I am very grateful to those who have made compiled libraries for windows available to download, I don't have or want a compiler!
The progress of Lua from 5.1, 5.2 to 5.3 and soon 5.4 has created a problem - many of the previously released pre-complied libraries have not been updated and will not run under 5.3. This will stop many updating beyond Lua5.1/Luajit and for projects that do update their embedded Lua versions user like me will find addons/extensions requiring dlls will no longer work (e.g. SciTE: shell.dll, stubby.dll, gui.dll)
Attempts to find a library to allow cut and paste to the windows clipboard in textadept-curses (Lua 5.3) prompted my mail.
I know the "non-compiling" user may not be the main target audience for Lua, but as a beautiful interpreted language I feel the lack of "Live Batteries" prevents Lua becoming as popular as it should.
Kind Regards Gavin Holt
